


An Amateur Psychic's Guide to Remembering What Was Lost

by midrashic



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Push (2009), Charles Xavier Can Walk, Cherik Big Bang, M/M, Mind Control, Minor Irene Adler/Raven | Mystique, Psychic Abilities, Push (2009) - Freeform, threats of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:27:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26359465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: Hong Kong, 2011. Erik Lehnsherr lives in limbo: scrounging up money to pay rent from gambling dens or the scrapyard, not using his psychic powers, not dealing with his PTSD. When a teenage fellow psychic shows up at his shithole apartment with a get-rich-quick scheme, he's pulled into a world he thought he left behind—a world of brutal powers, deadly government experiments, and a mysterious man with a suitcase who is going to change his life… again.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 17
Kudos: 24
Collections: 2020 Cherik Bang





	An Amateur Psychic's Guide to Remembering What Was Lost

PRELUDE: PROPHECY

A long time ago, Erik Lehnsherr’s mother told him, “Listen to me. Listen, _schatz_. One day, a girl will give you a flower, and then you have to help her, okay? You help her, you help us all. I believe the woman who told me that, and you have to believe me now. Remember. A girl will give you a flower, and that’s how your destiny begins.”

Then she died. And Erik didn’t think about her last words for a long, long time.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

FIRST

The day Irene Adler changed everything, Erik Lehnsherr—currently Max Eisenhardt—opened his eyes to the glare of Hong Kong at sunrise slanting in through his flimsy, sunflower-patterned curtains. He levered himself out of bed, groped for his favorite—and only—mug on the nightstand, took a sip of cold day-old coffee, grimaced, and decided to spend a little time making himself a fresh cup. He stood at the tiny kitchen sink, looking out over the spread of sunlight that dazzled downtown Hong Kong in the distance, light playing off of the still-tall but boxy painted concrete instead of steel and glass skyscrapers that predominated in the poor neighborhoods. There’d be gambling in the courtyard.

While the coffee brewed, he counted his money. A little short on rent, and the month was about to turn. He could go down to the scrapyards, get it honestly, combing through mountains of junk for the rare metal components that could be resold and recycled: aluminum, brass. Copper, that holiest of holies. They had a name for him down there, because of his skill in sensing the metals—metals had always worked best for his powers. But a day of using his powers like that left him on edge, barely processing the world around him, good for nothing except getting a platter of _siu mai_ dumplings and stuffing his face before he fell into bed and slept like the dead, having nightmarish dreams of pain buzzing up and down his skin. Whoever said you couldn’t feel pain in dreams was a hack.

It was honest. It wasn’t very lucrative. He’d have to wake up tomorrow and kill himself all over again, using his powers all day, exhausting himself until he dissociated again. Or he could go down to the courtyard, use his powers for twenty minutes, and leave with another month’s rent and the rest of the day to recuperate, if he was lucky. No. Not lucky. If he was good.

He sat down with a set of dice and started to practice.

Metals were easiest, but if he concentrated hard enough he could move tiny non-metal objects. Probably more, if he practiced—he shut out the voice whispering in the back of his mind with firm practicality. Someone had once explained his Moving to him in terms of magnetic fields, but he’d been too busy screaming for his mother, screaming for the pain to stop, at the time to really take in what they were saying. The point was, he could change the dice. He rolled two sixes and concentrated fiercely on the third die. 2, 3… 6…

He twitched his index finger.

Six.

He took a sip of his fresh coffee and smiled.

— ⓧ —

FATE

He didn’t have a gambling problem, except the voice in his head that sounded annoyingly like someone he’d once loved insisted he did, because once he started losing he stubbornly refused to cut his losses, insisting that he could make it up if he were just lucky—good—enough. He won the first two rounds, made enough to scrape past rent for that month and maybe treat himself down at the market to an actual meal, and then he’d got cocky and lost it all again on the third round when a headache had started up and distracted him long enough that the dice got harder to Move. He knew that headache—it was the sign that he’d used his understretched powers too much, the swimming nausea and cold sweat that told him a dissociative episode was coming—but he gritted his teeth and said to the dice master, “Hey, spot me a grand.”

“You’re already out five grand,” she pointed out.

“Then you should have nothing to worry about, hey?” Erik smiled, trying his best for charming. He’d never been charming—too intense, said the voice in the back of his head he’d stopped listening to—but it seemed to mollify her, because she grunted and nodded. Erik threw the dice. The headache built in his head as he manipulated the last two dice—one on a six—his fingers shook—4, 5… 6—

—and then it overbalanced and landed on 3, and he took off running before he even had time to mourn his loss. The dice master was jabbing a finger in his direction, howling after him as her thug chased him down, “Where’s my fucking money, Max?!” and he slammed into the chain-link gates and shoved the door open, crashing out onto a tennis match in progress, before he scrambled for the courtyard door and jerked it open. The thug pounded after him, but he was faster, and he didn’t go straight for his apartment; he took the long way around, racing into the crowded streets until he was lost, enough people eddying around him to disguise his auburn hair and pale European features.

He stopped at a noodle stand and picked pieces of pork out of the cheapest bowl they had there. It was useless trying to be kosher in Hong Kong, unless you were rich enough to eat at the kind of restaurants where the chefs asked you for your dietary restrictions. He wandered for a few hours, picking pockets here and there, not enough to make up what he lost—he’d take the rest of his rent down tomorrow, maybe try a different game—but enough that he didn’t feel so frustrated about the way the morning had begun. When he finally wandered back to his apartment, he noticed that he’d timed it well enough that the thugs must have gotten tired waiting for him, as there was no one at the door and his lock was unbroken. He sidled inside and sighed.

The apartment was just as he’d left it. Peeling wallpaper—horses in canter—the faint musty smell of an apartment whose windows had been closed against the bugs for too long. He moved toward the coffee mug. He’d fall into bed face-first and try again tomorrow. He’d only been evicted twice in this city so far; he probably had a good six months left before his face became known to the authorities, before his reputation as a gambler and a con man and a man who didn’t pay his debts began to spread. Then it would be time to move on. Singapore, perhaps, this time. Malaysia.

He thought briefly about returning to New York, then shook it off.

His phone rang. He glanced longingly toward the coffee mug—probably a spam caller—who had his number, even? He sighed, reached into his pocket, pulled out the cheerfully buzzing flip-phone, and took the call. He didn’t say anything. Let the other person speak first.

“Open up, Erik,” said a high, childish voice. It was the first time he’d heard his name—his _real_ name—in over a year.

“What?” he said.

A knock on the door. The phone went dead. He stared at it for a second, then reached with his powers into his sock drawer and drew out a Glock. He brought it most of the way to him before his Moving gave out and he had to stoop to catch it as it dropped, gravity reasserting itself on the gun. The cartridge rattled around, not properly inserted; he pushed it in, then racked the slide.

“You won’t need that,” said someone through the door. “And it’s set to misfire anyway.”

Come to think of it, there was something sluggish about the mechanism that he could feel vaguely with his powers. He scowled and yanked open the door.

A girl was standing on the other side of it. Young—maybe not even eighteen—she wore a blue slip under a denim jacket, and sensible shoes; her hair was braided into two short, swinging braids, a little messy, like she’d done them without looking. She was smiling; a pair of sunglasses were perched on the brim of her nose. “Hello, Erik,” she said sweetly, and before he could react she had slipped sideways between his arm and the doorframe and was wrinkling her nose primly at the mess before her. “I’m Irene.”

“Have we met?” Erik said blankly.

“We’re meeting now,” Irene said. She perched on the futon he used as a sofa, a little uncertainly, like she wasn’t sure whether it was going to shift under her ass and fall out from under her—a fair concern, Erik admitted grudgingly. The legs were splintering. “But I know everything about you. Your name’s Erik Lehnsherr, and you’re a Mover, like your mom was before you. You just lost six thousand Hong Kong dollars playing dice roulette, and it’s not the first time. You could use a financial boost.” She pushed her sunglasses up. “So could I, for that matter. Which is why we’re going to find six million dollars—US, not Hong Kong—or we will, if you cooperate with me.”

“Uh-huh,” Erik said blandly. “Look, do you have the number of the school group you ran off from? Maybe a high-class nanny’s looking for you somewhere? Or an… institution, perhaps?”

“Only the same one that’s looking for you,” Irene said. “I’m on the run from Division.”

 _Division._ The word sent cold sweat down his spine. Division meant lock-ups—experimentation—Division meant death. His mother knew that very well. “Get out,” Erik said, his voice firmed to steel so as not to shake.

Irene was looking around idly. Or—not looking around, exactly, her eyes weren’t quite tracking. “That won’t work, Erik.”

“I don’t want any part of— _anything_ to do with Division.”

“Okay,” Irene said. “But the least you can do is get me dinner. After all—” she took off her glasses, and Erik flinched. The skin around her eyes was scarred—badly scarred—faded, as if it had happened a long time ago, but webbed through with lines of texture that spoke to how extensive the damage was. Her eyes were pale and clouded, and she smiled as he watched, as though she’d won something— “you wouldn’t let a blind girl wander around Hong Kong without buying her a meal first, would you?”

— ⓧ —

DUMPLINGS & DISASTER

“So tell me,” he said as she indelicately stabbed at her dumplings floating in hot soup with her chopsticks—not, Erik, thought, because of her blindness, just the crudeness of an American teenager who’d never been taught how to use chopsticks correctly—”about this six million dollars.”

“That’s not what I thought you’d ask,” Irene said around a mouthful of dumpling.

“What did you think I’d ask?” Erik said, curious in spite of himself. Irene gestured at her glasses. “I figured that would come up sometime during the question of the six million dollars, which, frankly, I’m a lot more interested in than I am in you.”

“I’m a Watcher,” Irene said, unasked for but smiling slightly, like Erik had just told a hilarious joke. “Like you’re a Mover.”

“I didn’t think all Watchers were blind. Seems a little Ancient Greek.”

“My mom was a Watcher, too. She blinded me when I was a baby. Poured lye over my eyes.”

“Now _that_ is Ancient Greek,” Erik muttered.

“I never got to ask her why. I figure… she must have seen something, right? She must have seen something that told her I’d need to be blind one day. Underestimated or… or just to keep me out of Division’s hands. What use do they have for a blind girl when there are dozens of Watchers, stronger Watchers, that can see perfectly well where they put their pencils? I just wish… I wish I could _know.”_

“Why don’t you ask her?” Erik asked.

“She got caught by Division,” Irene said shortly. “Anyway, that’s how I get around, being a Watcher. I’m Watching all the time, catching glimpses of things. Like where I am in relation to your couch. Or this bowl of dumplings.” She set the chopsticks down and reached into the satchel she’d hooked over the back of the chair. “Of course, I get more traditional visions, too. That’s how I knew where you were going to be.” She brought out a composition book, the cheap black-and-white kind that schoolkids used, with ruled lines. Seemingly from touch alone, she opened it to an old sketch and handed it to Erik.

Erik blinked. “Is this cubism?”

“Rude.” Erik glanced again at the pencil drawing in front of him. He thought he could see the vague outlines of a lump on a rectangle, the lines wandering and overlapping, as though they’d lost track of where they were. “The technical term for it is blind contour drawing, when you draw without looking at the paper or lifting the pencil. After all,” she said, and picked up her chopsticks again, “I am still blind.”

“So what is this supposed to be?”

“You. On your couch. Turn the page.”

Another lump on another rectangle. Erik squinted. He thought he could see a person—a lopsided head, the shape of the skull wandering into the lines of hair, mismatched eyes dripping into a prominent nose and pursed lips. Beside them was another rectangle, long and with depth, like an open book. “And what is this?”

“That’s our six million dollars. It’s in a suitcase that just arrived in Hong Kong.”

“And who’s that with it?” Erik asked, approximating that the vague figure was, like the drawing of him, supposed to be human-shaped.

She grinned. Her teeth glittered in the smoggy daylight. “You’re learning. And I don’t know who he is. I just know that he’s stolen something, and he needs our help. And if we help him… we _all_ get what we want.”

“Hmm.” Erik slurped at the dregs of his soup bowl. “I’ll give you this, kid. You tell a good story.” He pushed the empty bowl away. “But good doesn’t pay the bills. Word of advice, kid: next con you run, pick your target more wisely.”

“It’s not a con,” Irene said sharply.

“Spoken like a true conwoman. I would know.” Erik stood, pushed the chair back. He tossed a fistful of bills down on the table, the mental tally in his mind of the amount of cash he had ticking down a little with each one. “You managed to get to my apartment well enough with just your Watcher-sense, or whatever you call it, I’m sure you can find your way back to… wherever you’re staying.”

“But—wait!” For the first time all day, Irene seemed out of her depth. “Wait. You’re—are you just going to leave?”

Erik pretended to think about it. “Yep.”

“But… you’re supposed to help me,” Irene said, and there was a stunned hurt to the set of her mouth that almost made him reconsider. Maybe it would have, if the world had shaped him into a softer man. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.”

“Yeah, kid,” Erik said, “that’s the way of it.”

He turned to leave. He got about five feet before a man stepped in front of him, and grinning, said in Cantonese, “Fan Jing says that you have her money.”

Oh, shit.

If Erik were a Mover worth a damn, he could push the man back and make a break for it. As it was, he braced himself for a painful altercation. He held up his hands placatingly, and said, in his most accented, broken Cantonese, “Sorry, I don’t understand. Sorry, sorry, you have the wrong person.”

“Max Eisenhardt,” the muscle said, the foreign syllables rolling over his tongue with surprising fluency. Erik winced. They’d gotten one of the more cosmopolitan members of the Triads to shake him down, then. “Or is it Erik Lehnsherr?”

Hell. How the hell had anyone that found that out? Erik hadn’t used his real name since—well, since New York, over a year ago. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said hastily, trying to edge around the man who hulked over him, crossed arms and tattoos rippling across his biceps just another piece of a menacing picture. “Sorry, you have the wrong person— _you have the wrong person—_ wrong person, understand—?”

“Erik?” Irene asked, a hint of a quaver in her voice. “What’s happening?”

The bruiser wound back and prepared to swing. Erik swore, in German this time—no use trying to hide any longer, not when Irene had inadvertently blown his cover—and thrust out a hand to shove Irene’s chair back with his powers. She screamed as the chair Moved behind her—right, blind—but he sent her careening safely under one of the canopied fish market stalls. No need for a teenage girl, no matter how annoying, to get hurt because of his poor life choices. It wasn’t her fight, anyway. It turned out he’d Moved her just in time, because he ducked the man’s first fist but got hit in the solar plexus by the next hard enough to send him crashing into the table where he and Irene had just eaten, the spindly folding legs collapsing underneath him, the dregs of Irene’s dumpling soup soaking into his clothes.

He rolled out of the way as the enforcer slammed his fists down on the wreckage of their lunch, struggling to catch his breath. Around him, people were shouting, but no one was going to help him, which might have been beneficial, or call the police, which decidedly wouldn’t have been—they’d seen this too often, Triads roughing up idiots who ran afoul of their gambling or drug operations like Erik. At most, they grumbled and moved their wares and stalls out of the way. Erik glanced around. He could Move a cart in between the two of them and try to take off while the man was distracted—luckily he didn’t think the Triads knew about his Moving, or they would have sent psychics themselves, like Bleeders—but his powers faltered in the middle of trying to drag a wonton cart between them and it only skittered forward a few feet. The man grunted and buried his fist in Erik’s cheekbone. He staggered, went down to his knees. He could hear a girl crying hysterically behind him. Irene. “Leave him alone!” she was shouting—in English—for all the good it was doing. He wanted to tell her not to bother.

Erik uncurled a little from where he was kneeling on the ground and aimed a punch at the soft spot behind the enforcer’s knee. The man bellowed with rage as the hit connected and struck out, slamming his elbow into Erik’s jaw. Black shuddered over his vision then cleared. Erik threw his shoulder into the man’s thigh and felt him buckle, and then they were on the ground, scrapping like a pair of puppies, except each blow hit like a hailstone and Erik was skinnier and shorter than the behemoth they’d sent after him, and after a breathless moment of wrestling he found himself on his back as the man reared back, his fist cocked, and he braced himself for the pain—

— ⓧ —

DENIM DAISIES

Erik’s whole face felt swollen and painful. He tried to open his eyes. They cracked open with difficulty and light seemed to pierce right through them. He groaned.

“Don’t move,” Irene said, “you have a concussion.”

“No shit,” Erik grumbled. “Water.”

“I’m not going to pour water down your throat. I’d spill all over.”

“Fuck,” Erik said, and opened his eyes fully. He was curled on his side on the ground, the cool stone soothing his bruised cheekbone. Irene was sitting cross-legged across from him, worrying with a paper napkin from their cut-short lunch. “Where the hell am I?”

“The locals took you here,” Irene said, which wasn’t an answer, but she sounded so lost—geographically, but also out of her depth—that he gave up on trying to wrest answers from her. He hauled himself upright, groaning at the grind of cracked ribs in his torso, and blearily surveyed the hanging sign of an acupuncturist. There was something familiar about the street, which swam into view when he focused on it.

“The woman inside’s a Stitch,” he said after a moment. A healer, like his telekinesis and Irene’s foresight. “She can fix me up.” He groped for his wallet. It took two tries to get his hand into his pocket, and a little longer—god, he felt dull and exhausted—to realize that it was empty. “Shit.”

“Is this enough?” Irene asked.

He turned his head. She was holding out a wallet. Plastic daisies were sewn into the denim. Erik opened it; there were eighty-four dollars inside, American. “Where’d you get this?” he asked.

“It’s all I have in the world.”

“And why are you wasting all you have in the world on me? I’m not gonna help you with your scheme, whatever it is.”

Irene bit her lip. “I know, but—in the market, you could have—you pushed me away. You didn’t have to do that.”

“I’m not a hero, kid,” Erik said wearily.

“Yeah,” Irene said waspishly. “If you were a hero, you’d actually know how to use your powers and wouldn’t have gotten your face smashed in. Take the damn money.”

“Are you old enough to curse?” Erik wondered, but accepted the wallet. He’d pay her back—in the local currency—which meant that he’d have to take her back to his apartment, but at least he’d be able to walk straight. Damn. He’d only had to employ a Stitch’s services once before, when he’d been living in the States, and if it were up to him he’d honestly just have staggered home, concussion and all, and saved the money and saved the trauma, but he was sort-of responsible for a teenage girl now, and she was offering him the money, and she looked so sniffly and traumatized that he decided to take it just to make her feel a little better. “Wait for me,” he grunted, wondering when he’d become a babysitter, and forced himself upright. He trudged into the acupuncturist’s shop.

Inside it was nauseatingly brightly lit, concussion or no, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like cicadas. In front it was arranged like a Western pharmacy, aisles of small boxed products labeled in Chinese. He groped to the back, where an older man smoking a pipe eyed him coolly. “The Stitch,” he said, using the Chinese word for it—编织者, _knitter_ —”is she here?”

The man grunted and gestured him further back. Erik pushed aside a rustling plastic curtain. The back room was much more dimly lit, just a low wooden table for a patient to lie on and Chinese apothecary chests lining the walls. A single light hummed in the corner. “Hello?” he called out.

“I hope you have money,” a woman said.

“American money?”

She emerged from the shadows. She was in her forties, solidly built, more like a masseuse than an acupuncturist, with a square, suspicious face. “Let me see,” she said, and feeling a little foolish, Erik turned over Irene’s wallet, hoping that she didn’t pause over the daisies. The Stitch glanced inside, counted the money carefully, and nodded, pocketing the bills. “I’ll remove your concussion,” she said. “No more.”

“Thanks,” Erik said sarcastically, and laid down on the table. It was nothing like the back room of someone’s apartment where he’d been Stitched together in New York, _nothing_ like the cold sterility of the Division facility which had been the only time he’d experienced the untender mercies of a Stitch’s hands before that. He swallowed. Put his face in his hands, to ground himself. Behind him, he could hear the Stitch removing her yellow latex gloves—medical-grade—but not to prevent contamination, to prevent her from instinctively using her powers on everyone she touched, even as a simple acupuncturist.

She put her cold, dry hands on Erik’s shoulders and before the pain even started he began to scream.

— ⓧ —

MONSTRUM

After he was fixed, it took him a moment of shaky-kneed relief to shake off the traumatic memories, which he could newly experience in concussion-less clarity. The Stitch was impatiently tidying up around him—he’d dragged some of the chests’ compartments out as he’d thrashed in pain on the table—and Erik _knew_ he was weak, knew he was unusual in how long he needed to recover from the pain of being Stitched back together, but the memories were writhing just beneath the surface of his mind and he was lost, adrift in the sensations of feeling hands on his body, of feeling pain wrack him, of feeling his muscles shred and his skin tear itself apart at the command of someone else. Why had he agreed to this again?

Right. The girl. He hadn’t been about to ask a blind girl to drag him home just because of a little thing like decades-old trauma. He hauled himself up and dragged himself past the smoking old man, then outside, where the air was tinged very faintly with the scent of marine life from the fish market and where Irene was sitting on the low step, hunched in on herself and looking very small. She tilted her head when his footsteps sounded on the linoleum floor of the shop. “Erik?” she asked, a little uncertainly.

“That’s me,” he sighed. His hands were still shaking. He sat down on the step next to her and hoped her Watching wasn’t good enough to see that it wasn’t compassion that had him sinking down to her level but his literal inability to stand upright any longer—not physically, the Stitch had healed all but the cut on his lip and faint bruises on his face and ribs, but psychologically. “Give me a minute, then we can go back to mine and I’ll pay you back.”

“You don’t have to,” Irene said.

“You said it was all you had in the world,” Erik said reprovingly. “I’m an asshole, but I’m not a monster.”

Irene seemed to consider this mutely. Then she thrust out her palm in Erik’s direction. She’d folded the napkin from their lunch, worn soft and ragged by the oils in her hands, into a boxy origami shape. “Here.”

Erik frowned at it. “What’s this?”

“Just take it.” Erik took it. “You… you didn’t sound like you were having a very good time in there.”

“You ever been Stitched up, kid?” She shook her head. “Good. Keep it that way.” He turned the napkin-shape over in his hands curiously. “You made this?”

“Yeah,” Irene said. “Something to keep the hands busy.”

“What is it?”

“A lotus flower, asshole.” Now that she’d said it, he could see it; the way she’d folded the corners of the napkins into curling petals, the soft shape of the bulb, the interlocking patterns of nature. Nice. He felt oddly touched, by this kid who heard him hurting and whose first impulse was to give him—

It took him a long moment to remember. It was his mother’s perfume that came back first, something light and floral, something that made him think of sunflowers tipping their faces to the light. Her time-worn hands on his face. The sound of Division soldiers running down the hallway. Desperation baked into the crumb of her voice.

One day, a girl will give you a flower.

He dropped the lotus blossom. Irene scowled at him, picked it up—she had to grope her fingers a little along the ground before she found it—and dusted it off. But Erik barely noticed, he was too busy trying to forget the next part of what his mother had said, the last thing his mother had told him before Division had killed her: _And then you have to help her, okay? You help her, you help us all._

“Give it back,” he said shakily.

She frowned at him. Her eyes narrowed behind her dark glasses, as though she were trying to interpret his expression. “Not if you’re just going to throw it away again.”

“Give it,” Erik said, and she handed it over, perhaps spooked by something raw and bleeding in his voice. He turned the lines of the origami shape over in his hands, not quite able to parse the way she’d turned the flat surface of the napkin into this spiked, curling three-dimensional thing through folds and creases, through the gentle pressure of her fingers. Like Stitching, but in reverse. This was stupid. This was going to be the stupidest thing he’d ever done. It was just a napkin. It wasn’t even a real flower. But he knew he was going to do it anyway.

Before she’d died, his mother had called him _schatz_. It was a childhood nickname, from when they’d been living in Germany. She hadn’t called him it in years, not since they’d moved to the States, and she’d switched to _dearest_. She’d told him to help Irene. And she’d called him _schatz._ And that’s why he was doing this, that one word, at that one moment. “Okay,” he said. He tipped his head back. Felt weak sun on his face. “Okay. Six million dollars. Where do we start?”

— ⓧ —

CARTOGRAPHY

They started at a bar.

“There are a lot of psychics in Hong Kong,” Erik explained to Irene. “Expats running from Division, but natives, too. And in the Hong Kong psychic community, it’s all about who you know.”

“I don’t see why I can’t come with you,” Irene complained, sounding very young and very petulant.

“Because they won’t even card you, they’ll just laugh you out of the place,” Erik said. “Excuse me,” he called over, and a gaggle of young women stopped and eyed him. “Excuse me,” he said, speaking in English, for Irene’s sake, slow, for the women. In a cosmopolitan area of the city like this one, Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong’s party central, the chances were good that they had some English. “I need to go inside to see a friend. My sister, can you make sure she doesn’t get in trouble?”

A chorus of “Of course!” and “Don’t worry about it!” met him. One of the women was already drawing Irene to her side, babbling sweetly to her in tones that Irene absolutely wouldn’t be able to understand. “They think you’re my pimp,” Irene said through gritted teeth.

“Probably,” Erik agreed in the same undertones, and slipped through the crowd of Happy Hour-goers into the bar.

He waited, his fingers drumming on the tacky surface, neon lights pulsing above him and the babble of Cantonese and other, stranger languages rising and falling all around him, as the girl behind the bar finished making someone a Manhattan and slid it across the slick, shiny faux-marble of the bar. She turned to him. “What can I—Max!” she said, surprise bright in her voice.

“Xi’an.” Xi’an Coy Manh was a weak Pusher—someone who could Push thoughts into people’s heads. Vietnamese born, but a Hong Kong exile like the rest of them; now she used her skills mainly to keep people from making trouble in the bar where she worked. “I’m not here to drink, sorry.”

“You never are,” she said ruefully. “So what is it you need this time? A Sniffer to find your lost wallet? A Shadow to hide from your creditors?”

The thing about being a weak Pusher who could only compel someone to leave a building or pay their tab before the compulsion faded was that Xi’an wasn’t a threat to anyone, least of all to Division. So she’d carved out a niche for herself in knowing _everyone_ in Hong Kong who was psychic, even those who wanted to stay under the radar. If a man with a suitcase was on the run from Division, she would know about it—or know someone who knew about it. Today, Erik was looking for the latter. “I want to find someone. And it’s a little tricky. I can pay.” Or he would be able to, once he had his half of the six million dollars. Until then, what was a little debt between friends?

“Right,” Xi’an said, unconvinced. But she took out a business card and wrote an address on the back of it. “He’s hanging out in Wan Chai nowadays. You can’t miss it. It’s a shithole surrounded by skyscrapers.”

“Thanks,” Erik said, “I owe you one,” and ignored Xi’an muttering, “You owe me four, jackass,” as he headed out to rescue Irene from the tender mercies of the women in whose care he’d left her.

On the taxi ride from Lan Kwai Fong to Wan Chai, Irene pulled out her sketchbook. It was strange, watching her draw; she stared straight ahead, for all the world not paying attention to the way her pencil was moving. The bumping and swaying of the road didn’t do much for her artistic skills, either. Erik tilted his head against the window and watched the lights of the city, getting brighter and more colorful as the night drew shadows around itself, pass. They were a few blocks away when Irene put her pencil down. Erik glanced over; it was a head and torso set in front of what might have been a beaded curtain, a man’s expression contorted into a snarl, a fierce one given how hard Irene’s pencil had pressed into the paper, how sharp and clear the lines were. Erik thought he was getting better at deciphering Irene’s visions.

“Is this who we’re going to see?” Irene asked.

“Maybe. Only know him by reputation,” Erik sighed. “What’s that he’s holding?”

Irene’s pencil tapped fretfully on the corner of her the page. “I don’t know. It looks like a little silver puzzle piece?”

“Hey, kid,” Erik said abruptly.

“ _Irene._ ”

“Whatever. How’d you learn about this big supposed payday from whatever junior prep school you came from?”

“You wait until _now_ to ask me?” Irene said. “I don’t think you actually really want to know the answer.”

That was true. He had to help her, he didn’t have to know anything about her or care about her, he reminded himself. Still. “Humor me,” he said.

“You have your sources, I have mine,” she said. “I’ve been on the run from Division for almost as long as you have. Plus, I have,” she tapped at her glasses pointedly. Erik sighed. It wasn’t enough—he’d known a few Watchers in his day, and they’d never come up with anything as vague as “Six million dollars will be arriving in Hong Kong and you can grab it if you’re fast enough.” Still, she was closed-up, enigmatic, and he was familiar enough with the stubbornness of teenagers to know that if he wanted to pry open her secrets, it wouldn’t be by taking the direct approach.

When the cab stopped, he unfolded a couple of bills from one of the wallets he’d lifted from the women in whose care he’d briefly left Irene and stepped outside to survey a cigar shop. Xi’an had been right: it was run-down, shabby, the sign hanging crooked and the red-painted trim around the doors and windows peeling. The lights were out. “Can you tell if anyone’s home?” he asked Irene.

“I saw someone _somewhere,”_ Irene said, which was not as helpful as she obviously thought it was. “Wherever it was, we’re on the right track to find them.”

Erik craned his neck glancing into the windows. Still dark. “The beaded curtain, right.”

Irene’s smile was audible in her voice. “You could tell that was a beaded curtain?”

“With difficulty,” Erik countered. Irene’s scowl was audible as well. “Screw it.” He knocked on the door, then more vigorously when no one answered. Irene drifted closer, her hand on the old and weathered wood, the faded paint. “Hey! Anyone back there?”

“Have you tried opening the door?” Irene suggested waspishly.

“It’s Hong Kong, not Mayberry—” but the doorknob turned under his fingers. He let them in, a little annoyed at himself and definitely annoyed at Irene, who glided in like a queen. Inside was dark and the air was redolent with the scent, unsurprisingly, of cigars. Erik fumbled for a light switch. Irene moved from his side; he wanted to stop her, to draw her back, but he could barely see the curve of her shoulder and of course Irene could see as little as ever whether it was full day or midnight. When he found the light, he blinked in surprise.

It was actually pretty nice—the furniture was old and shabby like the exterior of the shop, with shagging cushions and chipped wood in the British Imperial style, but it was all neatly and spaciously arranged and the light was warm and cheerful, reflecting off bright yellow-painted walls. There were lamps everywhere. The front area looked like a regular cigar shop, with pale unextraordinary boxes that held, presumably, cigars arranged on shelves; the back area was a sampling room of some sort, with lounging furniture set up to create several alcoves where people could congregate as they, Erik didn’t know, sniffed and snipped and did whatever people with cigars did, he’d never been able to afford them himself. In the far back was a small dark doorway, over which hung a beaded curtain. He didn’t need Irene’s elbow in his ribs to tell him that that was where he’d find their contact.

“Hello?” he said again. “Xi’an Coy Manh sent me. She said you might be able to help us.”

A low groan. Something that sounded a little like “Go fuck yourself.”

Erik felt increasingly uncertain about this endeavor. He considered his ability to Move a strand of the beaded curtain around someone’s neck to strangle them if they came out through the back room. He didn’t like his odds, even if the man they were hunting for was a Sniffer, a non-combat ability—he hadn’t tried to Move anything since he’d gotten Stitched together, and he suspected the PTSD would make his powers even slower and more useless for a while. 

Irene, meanwhile, seemed to have abandoned all sense. She stepped forward, into the sitting area, and called, “We have money.”

A low sniff. “I can smell the lies coming off you, girlie,” the man called back from the dark room. The curtain shifted. Erik tensed and braced himself. “I’m not interested. Go tell Division or who-the-fuck-ever that Akihiro Howlett says _he’s not interested_.”

“We’re not with Division,” Irene said. “In fact, we’re trying to stop them. My name is Irene Adler.”

The curtain stilled.

“You Cass Adler’s girl?” Howlett said.

“Yes,” Irene said.

“Fuck,” Howlett said, and shoved the curtain aside.

He was a solidly built man, a spare few inches shorter than Erik but broader and more… ferocious, frankly. He was wearing plain black leather gloves, water-stained and battered, the sign of a Sniffer or a Stitch, someone whose psychic powers activated with a touch. His eyes glinted with an uncommon hardness, and Erik got the impression, as Howlett’s gaze roamed over him, that if Erik had been the one who’d kept pressing, he’d be on the floor with his throat open from the bowie knife glinting in Howlett’s hand. Howlett only softened into something remotely approaching humanity when he laid eyes on Irene, who stood there, unperturbed, as though she hadn’t noticed the wickedly glinting knife. Erik considered trying to Move it, but bile rose up in his throat. No, that wouldn’t work. As though he could sense the way Erik’s thoughts were going, Howlett’s eyes snapped back to him. “And who the hell are you?”

“That’s Erik,” Irene answered for him. “He’s a friend.”

“Not _my_ friend,” Howlett said sharply. 

“Yes, your friend,” Irene said implacably. “You knew my mother?”

“Yeah, kid,” Howlett said coldly. “Everyone knew your Ma. Greatest Watcher that ever lived, they called her.”

Irene shrank in on herself. “Yeah,” she sighed. “That’s her.”

“She did me a favor, a long time ago,” Howlett said, sounding a little distant. It was the first hint of a man who didn’t live balanced on the edge of the knife he was holding, the knife he had lowered, though Erik suspected that didn’t make him any less dangerous. “Said that all I had to do was help her daughter, when she came looking for it. And here you are.” 

“Here I am, Mr. Howlett,” she said, formally and regally as a queen. “Will you help us?”

“Fuck,” Howlett sighed. “Call me Akihiro, kid.”

— ⓧ —

PSYCHOMETRY

Akihiro made them tea.

Behind the bead curtain was a small kitchenette. Akihiro shoved the curtain aside and flipped the lights on. Apparently he’d been drinking straight from a bottle of sake when they’d shown up. Erik and Irene sat at the table, Irene’s hands folded neatly in front of her like she wasn’t a little hellion. As Akihiro bent over the steeping cups of tea, Erik said under his breath, “Your mother, huh?”

Irene smiled mirthlessly. “She got to you too, I guess,” she said. “Why else would you have changed your mind so quickly about me? I don’t know what prophecy she told you, but… she’s been spinning the web of my life for a long-ass time.”

“My mother told me a girl would give me a flower,” Erik said, his lips forming the shape of his mother’s last words as though her ghost were superimposed over his own body. “And that I had to help her.”

“She heard it from my mother,” Irene said. “’The Greatest Watcher Who Ever Lived.’”

With surprising delicacy, Akihiro set a pair of cups in front of them, fragrant green steam rising from each. After watching Akihiro gulp from his own, Erik took an exploratory sip; the flavor was more vegetal than the floral, sweet green teas of Hong Kong he was used to, almost grassy, saltier. It was Irene Akihiro addressed when he’d drained his cup, and, seeming slightly more sober, asked, “So what do you need?”

“There’s a man,” Irene said.

Akihiro waited. “Can you be more specific than that? Anything of his? Anything _useful?_ ”

“You’re the best Sniffer in Hong Kong,” Erik said. “We don’t have anything you can use to track him, but the Watcher here has a picture of you being useful anyway.”

“What we know is that the man we’re looking for is on the run from Division,” Irene said. “He’s stolen something. Something important. Something worth six million dollars.”

Akihiro looked at them for a long moment. Then he stood and headed out to the front rooms. Irene and Erik trailed after him. “It’s funny,” he said, in a tone of voice that suggested that he didn’t think it was very funny at all, “You’re not the first person to quote that figure at me today. Someone from Division stopped by.” He opened a glass cabinet and pulled out what looked like another box of cigars. Opening it, though, displayed an array of trinkets and personal items: single earrings, a stress ball, a marble, a fan. Akihiro pulled out something sealed in a plastic evidence bag. “Division’s been spreading these to every Sniff in the city. The reward for finding… whoever it is you’re both looking for… is six mil.”

Irene leaned forward, as though she could see what was inside the baggie. “What is it?”

“Bit of a watch,” Akihiro said. Erik squinted, and what Irene had described as a “silver puzzle piece” coalesced into one of the cheap adjustable watch links men could use to lengthen or shorten a watch band made out of those pieces. It must have been yanked off someone’s wrist, to come apart so totally. “I stuck it in with the other stuff because I’m not going anywhere remotely near doing Division’s bidding, not for all the money in the world. City like this, they’d be hard pressed to find a Sniffer that would. Now you’re telling me you want me to find this man for you. To send Cassie Adler’s daughter along to cross paths with Division, maybe to her death. Or worse.”

Irene was silent. Erik stepped in front of her. “Just find the guy for her. Anything else, we’ll take care of.”

Akihiro snorted. “You a psychic, too?”

“I’m a Mover,” Erik said cautiously.

“Second gen,” Akihiro said, as though it wasn’t even a question at all.

“Yeah,” Erik said. “What, can you smell it on me?”

Akihiro’s mouth curved into a sneer. “They kill your folks?”

Erik clenched his teeth. That seemed to be enough for Akihiro. “Division did much worse than that to my Pa. They made him forget he had anything else outside of Division, pumped him full of that experimental shit and turned him into a sniffer dog. If he’s still alive—if their experiments haven’t killed him yet—he’ll be the one on the tail of your man.” Akihiro unsealed the baggie and dumped the watch link into his hand. With his teeth, he unpeeled the leather glove from his free hand.

He hesitated for a moment, fingers dawdling over the watch link in his still-gloved hand, before he pressed his fingers to it. The moment he did, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he sighed. His brow furrowed.

“I can’t… it’s like he’s being Shadowed. Lucky for you, I don’t think anyone else in the City is strong enough to find him. Must be why Division’s going crazy.” He opened his eyes. “He’s in a parking garage in Tsim Sha Tsui,” Akihiro said. “But he won’t be there for long.”

— ⓧ —

FLUORESCENT

Tsim Sha Tsui, the land of shopping malls. They paid the next cabbie double to get them to the parking garage Akihiro had circled on a map for them. Irene seemed too nervous to draw anything; she clutched her sketchbook to her chest and opened it frequently, flipping through but never seeming to settle on a page. “Level two,” Akihiro had said, and they got off at the ground floor, heading straight for a set of concrete stairs spiraling up. Irene grabbed Erik’s elbow tightly; he looked at her, baffled. “Lead me,” she said, “and run,” and Erik ran, his heart pounding for reasons he wasn’t sure of, like Irene’s intensity had rubbed off on him. He didn’t even know what he was running towards, and yet it felt like the most important journey of his life.

Up one flight. Then another.

They emerged onto the vast concrete landscape of a parking garage at night, the long lines of cars dotted with vacancies. It was huge, cavernous, but like a tracking hound, Irene’s face tipped toward a man speaking to a young couple—they were enthusiastically greeting him like an old friend, and he was nodding, the nod of someone who had no idea what they were saying but was going along with it. He’d tricked them, somehow, he’d convinced them that they knew him—and he was getting away—the couple had opened their car door—

“Hey!” Erik shouted.

The man spun, reaching into his satchel—and pulling out a gun—Erik instinctively tried to concentrate on it, but his Moving wavered, then sputtered out—he leveled it first at Irene, then at Erik—then the gun lowered.

Erik met the man’s eyes—

—and he _remembered_.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

INTERLUDE: CONEY ISLAND 2009

Erik remembered—

It started in Atlantic City, in one of the casinos—Erik could no longer remember which. He’d moved there eight months before after a stint in Vegas—after a stint that had ended in him more or less being run out of town—and now was trying his luck at craps and roulette in a different city, with his inconsistent Moving and well-honed instinct for when a casino was getting suspicious that someone was winning _too_ regularly. Yeah, he hadn’t moved up in the world much in the last few years.

He’d been wearing his casino disguise—neat, subtly designer clothes, no obvious logos or anything, a real gold watch, not a knock-off, casino management could spot that kind of thing from twenty yards away—the kind of clothes that implied that when he was on a losing streak he had the money to pay it off, so please don’t kick him out. He was bent over a roulette wheel, his head pounding with the effort of maintaining the Move, watching the little ball spin and spin, and the man was a table over, wearing actual designer clothing and dangling off of a stern-looking older woman’s arm—a different kind of con—but watching Erik with fascination. His blue eyes avid. His cheeks flushed, lips parted, an almost sexual pleasure to the way he watched Erik work.

Erik noticed, of course, but he thought it was just someone attracted to him—poor man, obviously someone’s arm candy, he probably didn’t get a lot of magic happening in the bedroom—and he was losing, anyway. Every time he thought he had control of the ball, it stuttered just out of reach, and he was down another few hundred dollars. Roulette was tantalizing—all you needed was for the ball to hit your number, just once, and it could wipe out an hour’s worth of losses. And he could _feel_ it, he could feel his powers licking at the surface of the roulette ball, he could _touch_ it, almost—but when he tried to follow through, he either poured too much or too little power into it, and overshot by two slots. Maybe three.

He could do it. He could _do_ it. The people around him were edging away from the grim set to his mouth, the raw determination in his eyes. Bad for his cover—not very much like a gambler, this firm belief in ability and not chance. He was about to bet his last two hundred when the man took his elbow and said, “Before you throw away the last of your month’s rent, walk with me. I have a business proposition for you, my friend.”

His name, he told Erik, was Charles Xavier. Erik sized him up. Affected, posh Oxford-boy accent. Shorter than Erik, a touch broader—Erik thought he could probably take a pretty boy whose idea of a good con was convincing his sugar mama to increase his monthly allowance to ten thousand a month instead of eight—but there was something glinting and amused in Xavier’s eyes, something that told Erik that he would come off the worse from a fight, so he didn’t try. He let Xavier lead him to a tiny men’s bathroom tucked away in an alcove off one of the gaming parlors, small and out of the way enough that they’d have privacy—as much privacy as anyone ever had in a casino. Soft light fluoresced off the black and white tiles of the bathroom.

Erik leaned against the sink. “So what do you want from me, Xavier?”

Xavier smiled. His teeth were very straight and very white. Not British, Erik mentally confirmed to himself. “I’ve been watching you.”

Erik smiled. A “business” proposition, hm? He could be amenable to that. If Xavier wanted to piss off his high-rolling “girlfriend” for a quickie in the casino bathroom with Erik, that was his problem, not Erik’s. Certainly not how _he_ would’ve conducted the con, but who was he to question Xavier’s methods? “Were you? Did you like what you saw?”

“Not particularly,” Xavier said cheerfully. “You’re quite bad, you know?”

Erik’s hackles rose. “That’s a terrible thing to say to a man who’s only down eight hundred dollars.”

“Not at roulette. I have a suspicion that if you didn’t gamble for a living, you wouldn’t touch the game, which is the only way to be truly _good_ at roulette. No, at the other thing.” He wiggled his hands by his head. “At the _Moving._ ”

 _God._ How stupid was Erik, to be lured into a secluded space with a Division spy with a pretty face and an intriguing smile. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said frostily, and, “Excuse me,” and tried to shove his way past Xavier.

 _“Stop,”_ Xavier said. And Erik stopped.

Xavier grinned again at him. The blackness of his pupils had swallowed the blues that had flashed at Erik all the way across the room. A Pusher, Erik realized with a heady wave of terror. Someone who could implant thoughts in other people’s brains. He’d wandered into a trap with a Division _Pusher_. “I know what you’re thinking,” Xavier said, even as his pupils shrunk back down and were overtaken by the blue of his irises. “I won’t Push you. Well. I won’t Push you again. I just had to stop you running out. Because I think that you and I can be very good friends with one another.”

“I’m not interested in working for Division,” Erik said through gritted teeth.

“Oh, goodness, me neither,” Xavier said, in that foppish, fake accent of his that set Erik’s teeth on edge. “I’m like you, I expect. A confidence man, except judging by the way I have entire wardrobes like this at my place and you probably spent half your month’s rent just to buy that outfit, a much more successful one. But I have… hmm, a little job that I need a Mover to help with, and I think you’d be just the man for it.”

“Why not offer it to someone who’s not _quite bad?_ ” Erik said sharply.

Xavier’s smile turned a little softer. “Because,” he said, “you’re the first other psychic I’ve ever met as an adult. When I saw what you were doing… even if you were getting it wrong. You just need time, and to practice, and maybe to work free of the pressure of being under prying eyes, and I think you could be quite the asset to the con I’m running. Maybe you could even shorten this whole tedious affair by a solid four to six months.” 

Erik was still tense. Xavier drifted closer to him, still smiling that annoying, ingratiating smile. This was a bad idea. This was a _terrible_ idea. Maybe Xavier wasn’t actually with Division—this was certainly the oddest recruitment Erik had ever heard of—but Erik stayed away from other psychics for a reason, stayed away from other _people_ for a reason. He had no evidence that Xavier wasn’t Pushing him right now, except for those eyes. Those lapis lazuli eyes. “What’s the con?” he said in spite of himself.

“A safe that needs cracking, of course,” Xavier said. “And a computer chip that’s worth, oh, about three hundred thousand dollars. My mark’s husband designs prototype microchips for Apple. And he takes his work home with him.”

“Why don’t you just Push them into giving you what you want?” Erik said suspiciously.

Xavier’s smile became self-deprecating. “Because I’m like you,” he said. “My powers are, hmmm, let’s say a work in progress. I can make people give me a second glance. I can make them offer to buy me a drink. I can’t manage industrial sabotage.”

This was a _bad idea._ “You have access to the safe?”

Xavier’s smile turned sweet as honey again. “It’s at their summer home. Just me and her at the moment. And the servants, of course.”

“Of course,” Erik parroted. “Look, Xavier—”

“Charles,” Xavier purred. “Call me Charles.”

He ran a hand down Erik’s sleeve. When had he gotten that close? Electricity fizzed through him. “I don’t,” Erik said, and forgot what he was saying. “I, uh. I work alone.”

“Maybe,” Charles said, and his hand was on Erik’s hip and his fingers were playing with Erik’s fly, “I can convince you… Give me a chance to convince you, my friend.”

And then he sank to his knees—

And Erik remembered Charles saying, impressed, after he returned the favor in that high-class casino bathroom, “You’re pretty good. We can do this again, if you like.” Charles showed up at his apartment several times after that, ostensibly to watch him practice safe-cracking, but they ended up in bed more often than not. They stole the chip. Charles cut Erik in for a hundred grand, as promised. He dangled off of Patricia Bellevue’s arm for a little longer, but increasingly the time she spent with her husband he spent with _Erik_ , in bed and out of it, and Erik wanted to know _why_ , needed to know _why._ Charles ran a different kind of con than him, had a different kind of _life_ than him, floating from woman to man to woman again, living a lifestyle of Rolexes and Audis, the arm candy of whoever would take him and keep him in the style to which he’d become accustomed, and yet he was sleeping in Erik’s ratbox of an apartment, and yet he was smiling at Erik’s cursing at the coffeepot in the morning, and yet he was DVRing baking shows on Erik’s TV, and yet, and yet. But Erik could never work up the courage to ask, in case it brought Charles to his senses, in case naming it made it disappear, a magic trick, a con artist’s sleight of hand.

After Bellevue, Charles should have started looking for another mark. He didn’t.

Charles watched him practice his pickpocketing with his Moving, the headaches it gave him, and never once mocked him. Charles listened avidly as Erik explained the short con, the street job, the pigeon drop, the dropped wallet scam. Charles kissed him, sweet and yielding, and Erik swam in the warmth of his regard, fully aware that this was how Charles’s marks felt, how Charles’s marks fell, wondering what Charles wanted from him, a broken Mover who could barely crack a safe. When Charles said, “Why don’t I help you out with the pedigree Pekingese scam?” Erik finally blurted out, “ _Why?_ What are you getting out of this? Why haven’t you found a new mark yet? What are you doing with me?” _What are you doing to me?_

And Charles looked at him like he was stupid and said, “I’ve fallen in love with you, Erik, and I want to share your life with you,” and Erik was lost. Long con or not, Charles could rob him of everything he owned, and he wouldn’t care, he wouldn’t flinch, he was adrift, he was capsized, he was _lost_. And for a year and a half, a blissful, _gorgeous_ year and a half, it seemed that he had no reason to doubt Charles’s devotion. He gave up his life, his relatively luxurious life, and was poor but happy with Erik, running cons for a few hundred dollars, Moving dice and roulette balls for quick infusions of cash. 

And Erik remembered meals together. Sustenance. Charles hunched over the burner in their little kitchenette, starting a grease fire, throwing flour on it, and burning the shit out of himself, and Erik rubbing aloe into his lobster-red skin and saying, “I can’t believe you did that. I can’t _believe_ you did that. Didn’t any of your cooking shows tell you not to throw flour on a grease fire—” and Charles grumbling, “Like you would’ve known any better.” Erik shorting out the apartment’s fusebox with a blender plugged in at exactly the wrong outlet, and the two of them spreading late-night Indian takeout into a picnic on the floor, candles throwing light and shadow over their features, chiaroscuro, as New York at 2AM twinkled in the background. Running around various churches during the holidays, getting free meals, sitting down in front of Erik’s TV with turkey slathered in gravy and watching the Thanksgiving marathon of Erik’s terrible police procedurals, heckling them all the while. Charles sipping a raspberry smoothie in Bryant Park and kissing the taste off of his lips as pigeons and sparrows danced around their feet.

And Erik remembered days together. Cons run, yes, Charles leaving items like a dog or a violin in the hands of bystanders while he made a call or ran an errand, Erik offering an obscene amount of money for the hitherto-unsuspected valuable to the bystander, the bystander offering to buy the item from Charles when he returned, and the two of them departing a few hundred dollars richer, with Erik never returning to make good on his promise to buy the thrift-store piece of crap they’d found.

But also his head in Charles’s lap as golden afternoon sunlight fell like syrup across their faces, Charles reading aloud from a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel, doing terrible mocking voices, his voice changing in tone less than pitch, oh, his Scottish accent when he read for romance hero Angus MacTaggart. Terrible. Arguing over Shakespeare’s ambivalence toward the very idea of theater, its inherent silliness in _A Midsummer’s Night Dream,_ its terrible consequences in _Much Ado About Nothing_ or _Romeo & Juliet, _Charles pulling out historical documents to illustrate his claim that Shakespeare would have been surrounded by pamphlets and tracts decrying the morally corrupting influence of the theater, Erik stubbornly sticking to his guns that no one who wrote about ethics and the human condition so expressively would do so in a medium he felt was fundamentally immoral. Talking about dream holidays: Charles laughingly admitting that the English accent was feigned, until it became a part of him, that he’d always wanted to see the Globe Theater, the West End, the Strand. Erik saying he’d seen a picture once of the salt flats of Peru, and he wanted to go and stand there, in water so purely reflective that he might well be floating in the sky. The painted mountains of China. Route 66. They’d planned a road trip, never concretely, but just adding pins to a shared Google Map for when they did take that cross-country drive.

And Erik remembered nights together. The sex, of course, the shocking wet heat of Charles’s mouth on him, his low astonished moan as he pressed into Erik’s body, his red spit-slick lips parted in surprise and pleasure. But also whispering secrets to each other in the dark. Charles’s mouth pressed to Erik’s ear: “I don’t know how Kurt found out about me. Maybe I wasn’t subtle enough when I Pushed Cain into ignoring me, maybe… maybe my mother told him. But after the funeral, he found me, and said that I’d have to earn my keep if I wanted to stay under his roof… which was _my_ roof…” Erik made soft comforting noises into Charles’s hair. “He wanted me to Push his business rivals. But I wasn’t strong enough—he pulled me out of school—made me train on the servants—eventually I managed to Push one of them into signing over their company, though I think he was going to do it anyway. My stepfather died the next week. Boating accident.”

“Division,” Erik said softly.

“Probably,” Charles agreed. “They don’t take kindly to psychics abusing their powers. Psychics not in their control, anyway. I had to go, I had to run… I left my inheritance, everything. Cain has it all now, I guess. For a long time I didn’t use my powers at all. I hadn’t used my real name in years when I met you… I still don’t know why I told you the truth.”

“Fate,” Erik suggested.

“Probably,” Charles said, a hint of a smile curling his mouth.

And Erik, his breath hitching, told Charles about what happened after Division killed his mother and took him. About the Stitch. About how he’d learned that healing could be reversed, could be turned to hurt. About the scientists prodding at him, trying to determine whether pain would unlock the levels of power and control over his Moving that his mother had had, finally turning him loose with disgust when they found him wanting, when they found his powers like nothing his mother could accomplish. “And it’s still in me,” he whispered, “it’s still in my head. It’s why I can’t even move a dice on a good day. Why I practice for hours just to pick a pocket. I try, and then the world gets—distant. Like it’s moving through syrup. Like I’m not even a part of it. It’s moving too quickly and too slowly all at once, and I can’t— _concentrate_ —long enough to finish out the Move, it’s like I’m waiting on somebody else to move my fingers, to connect to the part of me that I’ve been cut off from.”

“It’s called dissociation,” Charles said gently, and it was the first time Erik had ever heard anyone use that word in reference to him. “It happens, when someone’s been through—a traumatic experience.”

“It was years ago,” Erik said.

“You still miss your mother like it was yesterday,” Charles said, and though Erik had never told him that, it was true. Charles knew him so well, Charles knew him inside and out. “You still miss yourself like it was yesterday, too. The boy you were, before you were forged into something else. The man you are.”

And the man he was burrowed into Charles’s arms and let out a low, desolate cry—

And Erik remembered moments of sheer wonder together. Skating in Rockefeller Center, catching Charles as he wobbled, and then tipping his face to the sky as it began to snow. Charles making up fake museum tours of the Met and the Museum of Natural History until tourists were following in his wake, none the wiser that Charles was talking out of his ass. And Coney Island. Rambling down the boardwalk as late afternoon faded into twilight. Eating out of the same container of supposedly-famous fries. Walking under the Luna signs, the twisting red-and-gold circles of an amusement park long shuttered. Parking under the Cyclone with a bottle of Jack and telling each other secrets, silly secrets, not the kind of secrets they reserved for being tangled together in bed. The first time Charles ate mashed potatoes, thinking it was vanilla ice cream, and how betrayed he was. The time Erik went to camp, before his mother died, and his shoe fell into a river after getting snagged on a tree branch—and he was dangling from a five-foot-tall cliffside for forty minutes, clinging onto a branch, with only one shoe. Erik remembered making love in the backseat of that car, slow and languid, like they had all the time in the world, like they were normal people with normal problems and normal, crushing love. It was the happiest Erik could remember being.

Erik remembered that the Tuesday after Coney Island, Charles vanished.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

BROUGHT BACK

Erik staggered under the weight of memory. “Erik?” Charles said, shock rich and aching in his voice.

“Charles,” Erik rasped out. “It’s you. You’re the one Division is looking for.”

Charles lowered the gun until it was pointing at the ground. He seemed lost—more than lost—he seemed like the world had collapsed in on him and left him spinning in free-fall. “You—you’re with them?” he said. He sounded _devastated._ “You’re here to take me in?”

“No!” Erik said. “God, no. You think—do you think that I could _ever_ —”

Charles relaxed minutely. “Then why are you here?” he said, raising the gun a little. When had he ever learned how to use a gun, Erik wondered dazedly to himself.

Irene was—not glancing between the two of them, exactly, but she’d taken a few steps backward, as if to better frame the picture in her mind. “You two know each other,” she said slowly.

“Yeah, you could say that!” Erik said. The couple who had been about to take Charles with them were long gone. He’d Pushed them, Erik realized. He must’ve gotten better at it. “Charles—what are you _doing_ here? What—” he struggled for words, the questions coming too thick, too fast. What have you _been_ doing for the last year and a half? How did you get mixed up with Division? What are you doing in Hong Kong with something worth six million dollars? And, above all: why did you leave me? Charles bit his lip, and agony sliced across his expression, as though he knew each and every question Erik wanted to ask and didn’t have good answers for any of it.

“What are _you_ doing here?” Charles said, his voice no longer sharp and unyielding, but turned softer, melting. “How did you know where to find me if you didn’t know it was me? Did anyone follow you?”

“No,” Erik said. “No, you know me better than that. The girl—she’s a Watcher. We’re looking for something valuable. Something in a suitcase you’re supposed to have.”

Charles’s lip curled into a sneer. “Still running cons, Erik?” he said a little bitterly.

Erik shook his head slowly. “Not like you,” he said. “You’re still the master. You win. Every time.”

Charles’s expression crumpled. Erik thought he would relish the pain on those features, but he couldn’t—would never have been able to, he realized. “Erik,” Charles gasped, and he set the gun on the ground and didn’t rise from his crouch, as though all the walls had fallen down and he was crumbling with them. “I’m sorry—I don’t know where the case is, I don’t remember—I woke up on a houseboat yesterday and I’ve been on the run from Division ever since. Are you here to help me? Please, say you’re here to help me.”

“Erik,” Irene said sharply.

“Yes,” Erik said, “of course we’ll help you.”

— ⓧ —

THREATS

Irene was sullen about it. She seemed to think it was a bad idea, no matter that it had been her who’d driven Erik to find the man, find the case. They found a park set on the waterfront and Erik parked Charles on one of the benches. They could see boats sparkling in the distance, the lights and bustle of Hong Kong floating out to them across the water. Erik sent Irene to get Charles a bowl of hot and sour soup from the mall, ignoring her grumbling, and when she returned Charles cupped his hands around it, breathing in the fragrant scheme. “You need to tell me what’s going on,” Erik said.

Charles took a deep, shaky breath. “Division had me.”

Those words—the last words a psychic ever wanted to say—Erik shuddered on Charles’s behalf, but Charles just sounded matter-of-fact, like it wasn’t Erik’s worst nightmare, Charles in the hands of those monsters. “You know the rumors… they’ve been experimenting with a serum to boost our powers.”

“I’ve heard,” Erik said, trying to steady the shake in his voice. They’d moved on from the experiments they’d run on Erik when he was a child, rudimentary things trying to determine what stimuli increased his powers. Now they were going chemical. Charles looked at him, and his eyes seemed to soften as he did, like he knew how difficult this was for Erik. But he didn’t reach out and take his hand.

“The rumors are true. They’ve developed a formula that, theoretically, can make us stronger—unlock powers that we never knew we had. There’s just one problem: it kills everyone who’s ever tried it.” Charles looked at his hands. “Except… they tried it on me. And I survived.” He took a shuddering breath. Erik wanted to reach out and touch him, but his hands were frozen at his sides. He was dissociating again, mildly, feeling like his body belonged to someone else, his limbs slow to respond. “I don’t know why. I don’t know how. They… they weren’t expecting me to. When I came to, the door was unlocked, and I ran. I stole some files, and a vial of the serum, and I managed to get out of there… and I’ve been running ever since.” 

“What files,” Erik said.

Charles bit his lip, not like he was hesitant, but like he was struggling to put the shape of it into words. It was Irene who answered, though. “Files about a psychic,” she said, cool, confident. “Specifically where she’s being held.”

“What’s so important about one psychic? Division does terrible things to psychics every day.”

“They’re not doing terrible things _to_ her,” Irene said. “They’re using her to do terrible things to everyone else.”

“They made the serum from her,” Charles said softly. “She’s not like the rest of us. She’s not a Shifter—it’s not other things she Shifts, it’s her own body. They think she’s the key. The key to unlocking the powers inside of us all. To enhancing our abilities.”

“Her name is Raven,” Irene said, “and she’s important.”

Erik could barely process what Charles and Irene were saying. He stared at her, trying to figure out this _stranger_ in front of him. He’d only just met her today, he thought. He ought to remember that. “You knew. You knew what was in the case all along.”

Irene tilted her chin up. “You’re right. It’s not about the money. It was never about the money. It’s about _our people.”_

“They want me back,” Charles said, when the silence hung too thick and heavy for too long of a moment. “But they want the files back even more. They’ve put a bounty on anyone who can bring me in.”

“But you don’t have the case,” Irene persisted.

Charles shook his head slowly. “I remember running. I remember… getting on a boat. And then… nothing. I had the case before, now I don’t.”

“You must have had yourself Wiped,” Erik said. “Made it harder for Division to track you with Watchers. They only see intentions.”

“Made it harder for _us_ to track down the case,” Irene said.

“What is your problem?” Erik snapped.

Irene glowered. “Can I talk to you? In private?”

She dragged him a little distance from where Charles was sipping his soup, his blue eyes trained on them. “We need to ditch him.”

“ _Ditch_ him?” Erik said incredulously.

Irene fumbled in her satchel. “He’s trouble. More than trouble. When I was waiting in line for the soup, I drew this.” The composition book was already open. Erik squinted at the squiggles.

“Irene, I don’t have time to decipher this—”

“It’s you and me. Dead,” she said, and there was a hint of a quaver in her voice, something that reminded Erik that she was only—god, he still didn’t even know. Seventeen, eighteen. “Erik, something’s changed. Before, we were on track to _get_ that suitcase, and survive it—”

“—and don’t think we’re not going to have words about that,” Erik said sharply, “that you lied about the money, were lying about the money all this time—”

“—the money’s not important!” Irene shouted. “We’re going to _die_ if we continue on this path, Erik, and it’s all his fault. He’s changed something, and if we stick around him we’re _all_ going to die. Except him, maybe. I can’t see anything about him.”

“I’m not leaving him,” Erik said, and knew it was the truest thing he’d ever said. A whole life spent as a conman, and it only took one man to turn him honest. It was like a bad cliche.

“I get it, you had a thing,” Irene said. “Is it worth dying for?”

“ _Yes,”_ Erik snarled, and Irene took a step back, startled, hurt. “Look,” Erik said, modulating his tone. “We’ll protect you, me and Charles. We’ll keep you safe. But I’m not leaving him. Understand? You need me to make this insane scheme to get whatever’s in this fucking case work? Well, I need him. So you can find another Mover, or you can help me.”

Irene shook her head. “It has to be you.”

“Why? Because the Greatest Watcher Of All Time said so? Because my mother heard a prophecy, probably from _your_ mother, and tied us together as her last act before she died and left me _alone_?”

“Yes!” Irene cried out, and her voice rose and fell like an ocean tide, like she was trawling a sine wave of tears and fury. “Yes, all of that! Because _it has to be you_ and I don’t know why because you’re an asshole and you’re selfish and you’re going to get us killed, because I had to convince you by any means necessary and money is the only language you speak, because this is _important,_ you jerk!”

“Well,” Erik said, having grown paradoxically more calm, more certain, the more upset Irene got. “So is he.”

Irene shook her head, despairing. “This is going to end bloody.”

“It always does,” Erik told her, and turned back to Charles’s side. “We’ll get a room somewhere, okay? And then we’ll figure out what to do.”

A taxi ride later, they were holed up in a run-down hostel on the fringes of the city. The kind of place teeming with backpackers from all around the world; three more _gweilo_ wouldn’t stand out. Charles, looking exhausted, sat heavily on the bed, plain white sheets somehow looking dirtier than a patterned bedspread would have. Irene perched on a chair in the corner with her composition book, angrily drawing—when Erik looked again—their corpses. Two figures slumped on the ground, over and over again, one with Irene’s braids.

Erik sat next to Charles, keeping a careful eight inches of distance between them. “We should get you a Shadow,” he said. “I have no idea why Division hasn’t found you already, but we can’t rely on luck anymore.” But even as he said it, he remembered Akihiro saying, _it’s like he’s being Shadowed_. But there hadn’t been anyone with Charles…

Charles stared at his hands. There was a faint tremble to them. “I think the serum did something to me,” he said softly, after a moment. “I think… I’m not just a Pusher anymore. I’m stronger now—Division cornered me a little while ago, and I… I’ve never been able to… but that’s not just it. I think… I think I’m Shading myself, Erik. I think I’m getting new powers.”

“That’s impossible,” Erik said sharply. “I’ve never heard of anyone with more than one talent.”

Irene snorted. “And no one’s ever survived their serum trials, either,” she said snidely. “Clearly there’s something special about Mr. Trouble here.”

Erik shoved his hands through his hair. “Okay, why don’t we all start from the beginning? I’ll go first. My boyfriend—” _the love of my life_ — “left me without a word, I moved to Hong Kong, and a girl found me this morning and told me we could make six million dollars if I followed her. Your turn,” he said to Irene and Charles. “Either of you.”

“What I know, you know,” Irene said, while Charles made a pained noise deep in his throat and said, “Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?” Erik said sharply.

“Don’t—pretend like what we had meant nothing.”

“Me?” Erik laughed, high and hard. “ _Me?_ I’m not the one who _left,_ Charles! You’re the one who didn’t even bother to explain—who didn’t even do my the courtesy of sending me a goodbye email—”

“Oh, here we go,” Irene muttered.

“I was trying to protect you!” Charles protested. “Division knew about me. I knew it was only a matter of time before they untangled the aliases, the false papers, the lies. I had to run. I didn’t want to drag you down with me.”

“So you can see the future now?”

“Maybe I can,” Charles said mutinously.

“Right,” Erik laughed again. “Your new powers. For all the good it did you. What kind of Watcher can’t keep themselves out of Division’s hands?”

“Hey,” Irene said mildly.

“I don’t know what you two want from me,” Erik said. “This is sounding more and more like a con—”

“And you’d know from cons, wouldn’t you?” Charles asked snidely.

“What were you hoping I’d do with my life?” Erik snapped.

“That you’d move on!” Charles shouted. “That you’d—be happy—be _better_ —that you wouldn’t just, just, do what we’d always been doing, but alone.” He licked his lips. “That you’d come for me. I—I didn’t want you to. I know they’d kill you. But a little part of me always hoped. That you’d come for me.”

And Erik had nothing to say to that. Because the moment he’d heard that Charles had been taken by Division, he’d known. He’d forgiven him everything. And he’d wished that he had come for Charles, too, regardless if he was weak and useless, regardless if it would have killed him. Somehow, everything had gotten twisted around, and it was him who’d sunk to his knees in front of Charles, him whose hands were on Charles’s thighs, soaking up his warmth, him that Charles was staring down at, his eyes dark, but not Push-dark, just shadowed with a lifetime of longing and loss. “I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice cracked, and he was. God, he was _so_ sorry. That he hadn’t found Charles, even if Charles hadn’t wanted him to find him. That he hadn’t saved him.

“Me too,” Charles whispered.

“I’m not sorry,” Irene said from the corner, and Erik closed his wet eyes—when had they grown wet?—and shook his head at her severely.

“Maybe,” Charles says, “it’s time for me to tell that story.”

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

INTERLUDE: THE STORY CHARLES TOLD

I don’t want to talk about it.

I’ll tell you the rest. I promise. But I don’t want to talk about the two months I spent at Division. It doesn’t… it doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t.

I woke up on a medical cot, in a room with long lines of medical cots. I was the only one there, though. I don’t know whether they were doing the serum trials one at a time or… or whether the others were just… taken out of there before I could wake up. Me and a technician. She was turned away, making notes, maybe. I opened my eyes, and it was like I knew _everything._ Like I knew exactly what I had to do.

I grabbed a syringe and injected her. I… I don’t know what was in it. I don’t know if she survived. I wasn’t even thinking, I was just… _doing_. I ran for the door. _He_ was watching, I could feel it—through mirrored glass—but I took the other exit, and I was in an office, and I grabbed. Anything. A spare vial of the serum on the desk. Any papers I could. I read them later. Some of them were useless. Administrative stuff. Some of them were about—

(”Raven,” Irene said.)

Yeah. Raven. The process of how they distilled the serum from her genetic code… logistics. They move her around. They use freight trains to disguise their medical facilities… decoy runners… if you didn’t have the schedule of when they’re going to stop off at the Division facilities to swap the processed serum for new supplies, you’d never be able to find her. I managed to get on the fire escape before the facility locked down… we were in Los Angeles. I made my way to a port ship. Stowed away.

On the ship, I… I learned I can Shift things now. They don’t last very long, but I turned the cargo into other things. Board games into dog leashes. Jewelry into travel mugs. I… I Wiped someone’s mind when one of the sailors found me. Erik, I’m changing, I’m… becoming something else. I don’t know what.

I didn’t even realize we were heading for Hong Kong until we were halfway across the Pacific Ocean. We got close, I remember that—I remember hearing the sounds of something other than ocean—and then—nothing. One minute, I was packing the papers away in a suitcase, the next minute, I was waking up on a houseboat in Stanley Bay, and there was a note in my hand that I didn’t remember writing.

(”What did it say?”)

4201 Coney Island.

(”That’s helpful.”)

I thought so. Do you maybe…?

(”I don’t know what it means.”)

Right. No, of course not. Right.

They’re not just looking for the case. They’re looking for me, too. They caught up to me yesterday… drugged me, but I… I could Push them. Even gagged and drugged and not facing them, I could Push them, at least into registering that I needed to be sick. We stopped at a gas station, and in the bathroom, one of the Sniffs… the one that wasn’t on a leash, like a feral beast… he was washing his hands, and I could see him through the stall, door, and I didn’t even need to make eye contact. I could _feel_ it, Pushing him, telling him that his superior… that He killed his brother. I implanted a whole story, a whole life. He met my eyes, and he _remembered._

Erik, I… I’ve never been able to do anything like that before. I got better after we… after us, I had to be, I was on the run. But nothing like this. Nothing like this.

I ran. He tried to grab me… I fought. They broke my watch. I guess that’s how you found me, a Sniff in the city. He was on the ground, collapsed in agony over the memories of a brother he never had, and I stole his keys and his coffee and I took the car and I ran, and I ditched the car in the parking garage and tried to catch a new ride, and that’s where you found me, and that’s my story.

They want to… I don’t know, dissect me. See what’s so special about me that meant I could survive. Because this… I’ve _never_ been this powerful before, and that’s just the Pushing. If they could replicate their success… if they could create an army of me… Erik, I have no idea what they could do. Take over the world, probably.

(”We have to stop them,” Irene said.)

Yes. Yes, we do.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

FALL BACK, I’LL CATCH YOU

“So?” Erik asked. “Can we trust him?”

Irene squinted at him. Not to see him more clearly, just to express her displeasure. “I thought you weren’t listening to my opinion on this one.”

“I’m not asking the petulant teenager who just wants to get out of here,” Erik said. “I’m asking the Watcher. Seriously, no bullshit, no tricks—can we trust him?”

“’No tricks,’” Irene muttered. “How does that work, coming from a conman?” Erik crossed his arms. She deflated. “I don’t know. If he is Shading himself, he’s… managing to hide himself from my sight.”

“I thought Shadows only worked on Sniffers, not Watchers,” Erik said, taken aback.

“And people aren’t supposed to have more than one ability,” Irene shot back. “Funny how that works. If he’s the most powerful Pusher in the world now, it’s hardly more of a stretch to think he might be the most powerful Shadow, or Wiper, or whatever, too. I…” She ran a hand over her sketchbook. “I’m not a lie detector, Erik. I’m a crystal ball, and a cloudy one at that. All I can see is you, screaming in agony. Me—” her voice began to shake— “me, being eaten by. I don’t know. A tiger.” She pulled her glasses off and scrubbed her hands over her face. “ _Tigers aren’t native to Hong Kong, Erik.”_

“Hey,” Erik said uncomfortably. And then: “Hey.” He awkwardly opened his arms, and Irene scrambled into them, like she’d just been waiting for the opportunity. “Listen. This thing—this Raven thing, it’s important, right?”

“Yes,” Irene said softly. “I can see that much, at least. She—she’s going to mean _so_ much, Erik. To everyone. And to me.”

“Then we’ll figure it out,” Erik said, and wondered when he’d gotten up and decided to be a hero.

Irene wiped at her eyes with her sleeves. “Look,” Erik said. “Why don’t you go… get another room? I’ll stay up, make sure nobody bothers us.”

Irene snorted. “Is that what they’re calling it nowadays?”

“He broke my heart,” Erik reminded her.

“Yeah,” Irene sighed. “That’s why I’m worried.”

“Don’t be, all right?” His hand was still on her shoulder. He squeezed it. “I’m serious. Don’t worry.” About the tiger, about their deaths. He didn’t know how he was going to fix it, but some of that old feeling was swelling up in him again, that easy belief that with Charles by his side, he could do anything. Charles wasn’t even really _by his side._ But he was just through that door, lying on those grotty sheets, and that was the closest thing he’d had to real peace in years. Irene blinked wetly at him, then nodded.

“Maybe I’ll get a drink,” she muttered.

“Don’t even joke. I’m… responsible for you now, or whatever.”

“My mother drank to enhance her visions. She was famous for it, actually.” 

“Not under this roof,” Erik joked, and Irene smiled, tremulous. She extricated himself from his grasp and took a few steps backward, as though she was embarrassed to be caught in such a weak moment. A blind girl who’d been on her own since her mother had been taken… she probably wasn’t used to vulnerability, like a street cat. Erik could sympathize.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Irene said, and then vanished, presumably to get another room, hopefully not to get drunk. Erik took a deep breath, staring at the scratched and battered wood of the door, and pushed it open.

Charles was lying on the bed, his knees dangling off the edge, but he sat up, yawning, when Erik entered. He smiled a little sadly. “Don’t worry,” he said softly. “I wouldn’t trust me either.”

Erik paused. “You can read minds now? Is that what Pushers with superpowers have to look forward to?”

Charles shook his head slowly. He looked very tired. “Thin walls. Did I… did I really break your heart?”

“Shit, Charles,” Erik said. “Of course you did. I… did you really not know? How much I loved you? Did you not believe me when I told you?”

Charles smiled, watery. “I guess I’m just not used to anyone loving me without me having to give them a little Push first.”

“But you never Pushed me,” Erik said. “Not after that first time at the casino.”

“How could you know that?” Charles said softly.

“It’s just…” Erik drew closer. Sat on the bed next to Charles. Charles turned to look at him better, leg crossed over his knee. They’d sat like this so many times, spent so many evenings like this on their bed, just talking, not even fucking, just _being_ with each other. “I can’t explain it. It’s just a leap of faith.”

“All this time,” Charles breathed. “Even when you hated me most. You never thought I was… making it up? Pushing us into being something we weren’t?”

“Stupid,” Erik whispered. “I never hated you.”

They were close enough now to kiss. So they did.

Just a brief brush of lips, a moment suspended, remembering all the times they’d kissed before, heated kisses, perfunctory kisses, first kisses, last kisses, but never anything that felt this fragile, this breakable. Charles kissed him like he was dying and had carefully weighed his options and decided that the very last thing he wanted to do on this earth was kiss Erik. And Erik kissed him like he was a broken man being made whole, which he was, which he would never be again. Charles tilted his face into the kiss, more a movement of breath than of lips, and Erik sipped at his mouth, a supplicant drinking at the altar, a place of prayer. When they broke apart, just moments after coming together, Erik felt like he’d had eternity dangled in front of him, dazing him with its infinitude.

Then Charles surged up against him and _devoured_ him.

His fingers grasping at Erik’s jawline. His mouth, hot and wet, reminding Erik of that first blowjob in a casino bathroom. His lips parting, short, demanding kisses, like Charles couldn’t bear to kiss him for too long but also couldn’t bear for them to be apart. Erik’s arms came up around Charles’s shoulders, tucking him close, dragging him into his body like he could keep him safe that way. Charles gripped his jaw and shoulder so tightly that Erik swore there would be bruises, and he didn’t care, he didn’t, let the whole world see him as Charles saw him, let them know him as Charles’s. Charles kissed him desperately, Charles kissed him desolately. And Erik kissed back like the world was ending, which it might have been, the ceiling could crash in on them and he wouldn’t notice but for the way they would have to stop kissing.

But he did notice the sudden salt-tang of blood on his tongue.

He drew back, startled. Charles blinked at him, then his hand drifted to his mouth and came away wet with blood. A fresh trickle dripped from his nose.

“Erik,” he said dizzily, “I don’t feel so well.”

— ⓧ —

VEINS

Irene, swaying and stinking of vodka, showed up just as Erik was loading Charles into the back of a taxi. “Were you—were you leaving without me?!” she said, outraged, too loud.

“Shh!” Erik hissed. “I was going to come back for you—Charles is sick—are you _drunk?_ ”

“I told you,” Irene said, drawing herself up, probably trying to look tall but only succeeding in looking slightly sick, “alcohol improves the psychic energies. Or something. And if we’re going to get out of this _without_ ditching Mr. Trouble over here, we’re going to need _all_ the psychic energies we can get—”

“Never mind. Never mind!” Erik said, fury tightening his voice. “Just get in the taxi!” 

Irene got in the taxi. Erik clambered in after her, ignoring her protests at being squished between Erik and a pale, exhausted-looking Charles who had only just stopped bleeding when the taxi arrived—god, he must have lost a quarter liter of blood—and said, “Wan Chai. Fast as you can.”

They sped back to Akihiro’s cigar shop—the traffic was better this late at night (or was it early in the morning now?) though still thick enough that Erik’s fist clenched and unclenched on his knee every time they hit a stoplight. Irene closed her eyes, looking faintly nauseous, but Erik had bigger problems than a soused teenager to deal with. He bullied her out of the car and into helping hold Charles upright, with Charles’s other arm thrown around his shoulder, and tried the door—it was locked this time—Akihiro had learned from his unwanted visitors. Erik swore and began to bang on the door.

“Fuck!” he heard from inside. Akihiro swung the door open, brandishing his knife, but froze when he saw the sorry sight in front of them. “What the fuck,” he said tensely.

“Help us inside,” Erik snarled.

Looking begrudging, Akihiro held the door open just long enough for them to maneuver Charles inside and watched as they deposited him on a couch. Charles swayed alarmingly. “Who is this?” Akihiro demanded. “What the fuck is wrong with him?”

“He’s the watch-man,” Irene giggled. “Not to be confused with the Watcher-man. Although I guess if you’re getting new powers, maybe that one’s coming?” she asked Charles. “Maybe you can see a way out of this mess that doesn’t end with us all dead.”

“He’s not your problem,” Erik said tersely. “Listen, earlier today, a Stitch laid hands on me. Can you use me to Sniff out where she lives?”

“Sure,” Akihiro said slowly. “But…” He drifted toward Charles, literally sniffing the air. Charles watched him with a wary exhaustion, as though he was literally too tired for any more surprises today. “I don’t think a Stitch is gonna help your boy. I…” He reached out a hand—luckily not the hand the knife was clutched in, or Erik would’ve—done _something_ , even if he was too weak and tired to jerk the knife out of Akihiro’s hand—and settled it on Charles’s wrist.

And then he jerked backward, swearing, shaking his head. He took two quick steps backward and might’ve gone further except he ran into the display cases. “Shit,” he said. Sniffers were psychometrics—touch telepaths—skin contact, or sometimes an aroma, took them back through the whole history of the object. It was why Sniffers like Akihiro wore gloves. And something he’d seen in Charles had scared him, badly.

“What is it?” Erik demanded.

“That shit in your blood… I’ve never been able to feel something that’s _in someone’s veins_ like that. And it’s pure poison. I saw the history of it, I saw what they were thinking when they shot you up with it… no Stitch is going to be able to help you. Plenty have tried.”

“Yeah,” Charles sighed. “That’s about what I figured.”

“No!” Erik said sharply. “No, we are _not_ just—giving up—”

“What are you planning to do, Erik?” Charles said softly. “Go after Division, shake out all their secrets from them? Make them tell you what they were planning to do to keep me alive?”

Irene looked at him. Erik gritted his teeth.

— ⓧ —

BREATHING EXERCISES

“This is a shitty idea,” Irene told him.

She had her head in her hands. Erik had no sympathy for teenagers with their first hangovers; Akihiro was kinder and had brought her a steaming mug of tea. Erik was seated in one of the leather sofas in Akihiro’s sampling area, his chin resting on his clasped hands. He was staring at Charles, who had fallen asleep not long after Akihiro had told him that he was dying, wrapped up in an incongruously colorful striped blanket on the plush divan upon which Irene and Erik had deposited him. He didn’t answer her.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” Irene insisted. Erik turned his head to look out the window Akihiro was smoking out of—not cigars, cheap knock-off cigarettes, Marbloros that you could find in gas stations here. Dawn was painting the sky in hazy pink and blue, the smog over the city shifting and bleaching the muted colors of sunrise. Somewhere, the man Charles thought of only as Him would be rising. The man who had been in charge of hurting Charles during his time at Division. The man who was now in charge of hunting Charles down.

“Fine,” Irene said, and stood up, dusting off her skirt. She marched over to Akihiro and, when he glanced down at her, amused, said, “In a minute Erik is going to ask you to use the fragment of that watch to track down the Division jerks that came after Charles. He just wants to stare at his boyfriend a little longer first, and if I have to watch that anymore I may barf, so please just do it now so that we know where to go.”

“You’re not coming,” Erik snapped.

“You’re going to go up against the full might of Division?” Irene said incredulously. _“Alone?”_

“And what are you going to do?” Erik sneered. “Throw your pen at them?” 

“What are you going to do?” Irene shot back. “Tweak their buttons?”

They glared at each other. Akihiro finally cleared his throat. When they’d been too busy posturing, he’d made his way over to the cigar case and was holding the watch link in his ungloved hand.

“If anyone’s interested,” he said, “they’ve taken over the Lucky Dragon diner in Mong Kok.”

In the cab, Erik gloomily considered that he was going to have to pick a few more pockets if he didn’t want to run out of cab fare and be stranded on the streets of Hong Kong. Irene had her sketchbook out. “We should probably talk about this psychological block you have around your powers,” she said.

“Let’s not,” Erik grunted.

“You’re going to try and kill a trained Division agent,” Irene said. “With what? Your charisma? No.” She hesitated. “Why _are_ you so shit at this anyway?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Erik returned.

“I’m shit at this because I’m seventeen and never had anyone to teach me,” Irene said. “You’re like, what, forty? You should have mastered yourself by now.”

“I’m _thirty-one_ ,” Erik said, “and the reason I suck at this is because every time I try to Move something I end up dissociating, okay?”

Irene frowned. “Like… multiple personalities?”

“I—no,” Erik sighed. “Like… trauma.” He felt raw, flayed-open, and tired from staying up all night, and it was that, probably, and not any actual attachment to Irene, that made him blurt out the story, albeit a sanitized version, of why he was no longer able to Move things with the joy and ease he’d done as a child. “When I was a kid… Division got ahold of me, and… anyway. Now when I try to Move things, I think about that, and it’s like I’m… somewhere else. Like everything around me isn’t real. It makes me slow to react. It makes the Moving… slippery, like I can’t hold onto it very well.”

Irene frowned. “Have you tried… not doing that?”

Erik snorted. “Have I tried—yes, Irene!” The pleather seats of the cab creaked below them as he rubbed at his forehead. “It’s not like I _want_ to be a shitty Mover.”

“I don’t know,” Irene said thoughtfully. “It keeps you safe from Division, doesn’t it? In a way that stronger psychics aren’t.” She shrugged. “But that’s something for a shrink to pick apart. I’m just saying… have you _tried_ staying present? Being… grounded?”

“’Grounded’ is a word for yoga hippies and air traffic control,” Erik sniped. “Plainly, now. What are you actuallysuggesting?”

“I mean… when you’re Moving something, have you tried… drifting back inside of yourself? Concentrating on the currents of the air on your skin. The feeling of your clothes on your body. Your breath, in and out. Not on the world around you, just on you yourself, the things you’re touching, the things you’re _feeling_. Sensation, not desensitization.”

“I’ve tried to break through the block before—”

“I don’t mean breaking through it,” Irene said. “I mean… living with it. _Breathing_ through it.”

“Are you _my_ shrink now?” Erik snarked.

“If you _had_ seen a shrink, maybe we wouldn’t be frantically trying to improve your skills before a suicide mission. Look,” she said, when Erik opened his mouth to say yet another snide and cutting thing, “I… I get it, I think? I know I don’t act the part, but I _am_ blind. Sometimes everything gets too loud. It makes me anxious, makes me… feel like I’m floating above myself. A therapist actually did tell me that when things get like that… to focus on my body. On the stretch of my ribs as I breathe. On the brush of my hair against my shoulders, on the stretch of my muscles as I stand. Or whatever. It helps. Just—try it,” she said. “You’re such a shitty psychic that it can’t hurt.”

More to humor her than anything else, Erik concentrated on the pages of her sketchbook, and closed his eyes.

Almost immediately, the familiar sense of being not-quite-himself swarmed him the moment the psychic muscles in his brain that was where his Moving lived woke up. “I can’t believe I’m taking advice from a seventeen-year-old,” Erik muttered, more to distract himself than out of actual disgruntlement.

“A seventeen-year-old _savant_ ,” Irene insisted.

He raised his hand to focus the psychic energies flowing through him. He breathed.

The air conditioning blowing on his hand, sending prickles of chill through his fingers. The squeak of the seats. The shifting of cloth over his skin. The pinch of his watch around his wrist. Air, in through the nostrils, expanding his ribcage, and then shuddering out. He felt the familiar disembodiedness casting over him, and he didn’t think he was successful in shaking it off entirely. He felt no great surge of strength through him, no sudden clarity of control. Perhaps a modicum more focus than he normally had. Perhaps a little more grounded than he usually was.

But the pages shuddered, then riffled through the air, a bending arc as though caught in a heavy wind.

Irene clapped, delighted. Erik exhaled, still attuned to the faint burn in his chest where he’d been holding his breath, and contemplated Moving the car through traffic. Moving their bodies through the air.

“Good,” Irene said, sliding her fingers through the pages, flipping back to where she’d left off. “I mean, you’re still going to die horribly, but maybe you won’t embarrass yourself when you’re doing it. It’s in a shoulder holster, by the way.”

“What is?” Erik asked.

Irene held up her sketchbook. For once, he didn’t need her interpretations at all. She’d drawn a gun.

— ⓧ —

LOSSES

“Stay here,” Erik told Irene sternly. She obediently sat down on the back step of the diner, where the cooks gathered to smoke and play poker during off hours. She was clutching her sketchbook to her chest, and suddenly looked very pale and very nervous. “What is it?”

“I can’t see how this ends,” Irene said softly. “I can see your intentions—to go inside and beat some answers out of Division—but they don’t know you’re coming, so I can’t see what they intend to do next.”

“So maybe I win,” Erik said.

“Or maybe you die,” Irene said. “I know I’ve been joking about it, but—Erik, you die _horribly._ I. I’d change that future, if I could. But I don’t know how.” She chewed on her lip. “This is a _bad_ idea,” she whispered. 

“What am I supposed to do?” Erik said plaintively. Irene looked at him—nearly looked at him—her gaze hit somewhere around his left ear, but it was as though she had locked eyes with him and whispered, _Let him die_ into his ear, seductive as a serpent. Erik shook his head. “I can’t,” he said, and Irene nodded slowly, like she didn’t quite understand. “No more than I could let you die,” he tried to explain, and that seemed to get through to her.

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay. Be quick. Ground yourself. Don’t—don’t leave me alone out here.”

“Be back soon,” he promised, and then pushed the back door open. It swung open quietly, the door a little too small for the doorway, the shoddy construction of this run-down neighborhood, where Division could squat and twitch their many legs across the web they’d spun across Hong Kong like a spider, on display. The kitchen was deserted. The stoves and ovens and fryers had been switched off, but half-cooked food still congealed in pans and on plates, as though the cooks had walked out halfway through dinner prep. Or as though they’d been Pushed out.

Erik stalked through the kitchen to the main dining room, slipped through the passageway into a high-ceilinged room filled with round rotating tables. On two of them, maps and documents had colonized the wood surfaces. A young man lounged at one of the tables, his suit jacket thrown carelessly over the back of his chair, with his feet up on a patch that had been cleared of papers. Beside him, turned away, was an older man, bald and broad, also in a suit. The gun was right where Irene had said it would be: tucked in a shoulder holster under the younger man’s arm.

Erik breathed.

The rhythm of his breath. Slow. Expansion and contraction. He reached for the gun and slotted his mind through its structure. Lifted it, gently, gently, from the holster, keeping the holster weighed down as if the gun were still there so that the young man wouldn’t notice. The rhythm of his breath. Expansion and contraction. He lifted the gun into the air, and noted with surprise that the floatiness, the out-of-body sensations, were tickling at the edge of his mind, but it was like his breath was a shield between him and it, it was like as long as he was breathing, the memories couldn’t touch him. He was here, in a grimy restaurant, his hands clenched into fists so tightly they hurt, his back against the cool wall, his breath. The rhythm of his breath.

He lifted the gun and pressed it against the young man’s head.

“What—” he said, sitting upright. “What the—”

He froze when he saw the gun, and Erik stepped into the light.

The other man turned around. He had proud, cold features, and there was something about his eyes. His eyes were dark. His eyes were bottomless. A Pusher, Erik thought with sudden certainty, and he ripped his gaze from the other man’s, focusing on the young man he’d stolen the gun from. But not just a Pusher, his mind worried at him. A clear leader. The man who had been charged with bringing Charles back.

“Ah,” he said, amusement coloring his voice. “Ah. I didn’t know it would be you. Edie Lehnsherr’s boy, Erik, yes? They told me a Mover would try to thwart my plans. But that it is _you_ … is a pleasant surprise.”

Erik, who had been prepared to demand answers about Charles, squinted, caught off-guard. “Do I know you?”

“Of course, Erik,” he said. “We knew each other quite well, once.”

Erik frowned—

—and memory struck him with the force of a blow. That calm, ponderous voice hadn’t changed in the years since he’d commanded a Stitch to make Erik suffer: “Let’s begin with the bones.”

The gun clattered to the floor. “You’re him,” Erik said, his voice cracking with sudden fear. He hardly even noticed as the gun floated back up, to point at him, this time, following the younger man’s gestures. Another Mover, part of him registered, but his whole world was consumed with the man before him. “Esmail Nur. Head of Division Research.”

Nur hadn’t been part of the taskforce that had killed his mother. Erik had only met him once Division had captured him, and handed him over for assessment and experimentation. He’d been in charge of the program researching how to push psychics to their limits, even then. Even with such crude tools as getting a Stitch to tear apart Erik’s body and put it back together. And now he was going to do the same to Charles, except his weapons had only improved over the years.

“Yes,” Nur said pleasantly. “I admit, I didn’t expect that it would be _you_ Charles fled to. How did you find him?”

“Get fucked,” Erik told him. He was shaking. When had he started shaking? The other man had floated the gun to Erik; it butted against his head, almost playfully. He tried to wrest control back feebly, but his breath was rattling in his lungs and he couldn’t concentrate on it, couldn’t concentrate on the gun long enough to even start a psychic battle for control over it.

“Uncooperative,” Nur sighed. “Just like your mother.”

“You don’t know anything about my mother,” Erik said through frozen lips.

“I know everything I need to know, Erik,” Nur said, almost kindly. “I have two dozen Watchers who have all seen this exact moment—including your friend Irene’s mother—and they’ve all told me how it ends. It doesn’t end with you killing me and standing triumphantly over my body, much as you would like it to.”

“It doesn’t end with me telling you where Charles is, either.”

“And how would you know that?” Nur prodded him gently.

“Because I would rather die than tell you that,” Erik said. By his head, the gun clicked and cocked.

“You’ll get your chance,” Nur said. “Still—it would be remiss of me not to try. I know what you’re thinking, and what happened to you was… regrettable. An early stage of our research. We wouldn’t do that to Charles, Erik. We wouldn’t hurt him. He’s too valuable for that. Charles is the key to ending all this. No more Division. No more experiments. Just an army of psychics, powerful enough to bring the world down around our knees.”

“Leave him alone,” Erik snarled.

“Fine. How’s this? You’re not equipped to deal with the consequences of your actions. The boy will die without Division’s intervention. Has the internal hemorrhaging started yet? Without the correct drugs, his insides will dissolve into blood. You’re not saving him, Erik. You’re killing him.”

“Then give me what I need,” Erik said. “If you really care about him, help me save his life.”

Nur smiled, kind, paternal. “I think not,” he said. “After all, I told you: I know how this story ends. We’ll have Charles back before the day is out.” He buttoned his suit jacket, finality dripping from his posture and words. “I’m afraid I have business to take care of. But I will leave you in the capable hands of Mr. Keller.”

He moved to the kitchen where Erik had entered, slowly, like he knew no one would stop him; and indeed, Erik was pinned down by the gun at his head. And then he was gone, out the back door—where _Irene_ was—Erik gritted his teeth and shoved down the memories of being split open by the Stitch, dug a hole, stuffed it inside, poured sand over it and set the ocean of his mind to slough it away. He focused on the gun tracing a line down his cheekbone, on the Mover’s—Keller’s—manic grin.

He felt it when Keller Moved the trigger.

He leapt out of the way just as the gun went off, felt a thin shock of heat across one shoulder—a bullet graze—but thankfully nothing worse. Mentally, he grappled for the gun—he had to deal with this asshole, he had to get to _Irene_ before Nur killed her—and his determination gave him strength, kept him—as Irene would say—grounded. The gun fell a foot and a half before Keller regained his grip on it, but Erik was pushing back, pushing his _mind_ back, the gun jerked and skittered through the air as they struggled for control over it.

Erik threw out a hand and tried something he’d never tried before: Moving a person.

Keller cried out as he was shoved backwards—just a few feet—but it distracted him enough that Erik wrested control of the gun from him, Moved it into his own hand, and he took aim, squeezed the trigger—

—but Keller had his hand up, and the bullets ricocheted away from him. He’d created a barrier, somehow, with his Moving, a wall that telekinetically deflected anything that got near him, only visible in the air as a oil-slick shimmer glinting with color when something impacted it. Erik gritted his teeth and emptied the magazine into the air, but the bullets fell, dull and flattened, to the ground at Keller’s feet. Keller grinned, feral, superior, and thrust out a hand, and Erik was punched backward into a pillar with such force that it cracked behind him. He staggered, struggling upright, but Keller shoved again, and this time the blow lifted him off his feet. He gasped for air.

Keller advanced on him, his hand curled into a fist, and when he was several feet away, telegraphed a punch—and Erik cried out as he felt the impact of the punch, magnified many times by the force of his Moving, it felt like someone had struck him with a two-by-four, not a telepathic punch, and he collapsed onto the ground, curled in on himself. Cracked rib, probably. Keller mimed a kick and it hit with such force that Erik skidded backwards ten feet. Erik put his hand up, trying to replicate the barrier that Keller had thrown up, but Keller’s next blow _shattered_ it, and though it softened the impact considerably, Erik screamed as the psychic feedback screeched through his mind. Keller was just a better Mover than him. A stronger Mover.

Another punch. Erik tasted blood.

He realized dimly that he was going to die here.

Distantly, he heard Nur’s voice. Sharp. Authoritative. “That’s enough, Julian.”

Footsteps echoing off the scuffed linoleum. Keller stepped over his body like so much refuse, his polished shoes glinting before Erik’s eyes. He closed them and pressed his face against the cool floor, letting it soothe his hot, bruised cheekbone. He heard Keller move away and join Nur, and then the two of them leave. _Irene,_ he thought, but he must have lost time, because when he felt he had the strength to open his eyes again, he was looking at Irene’s sensible shoes.

“You’re welcome,” she said waspishly.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

INTERLUDE: INTERCESSION

Irene didn’t know his name, either, except as a vague rumor floating around the underground network of psychics, but she didn’t know enough to put a presence to that reputation until after. She Watched and heard as a man appeared in the doorway behind her—not Erik—and took slow, measured steps down to the street below, watching her with amusement. She could tell he was a Pusher; in her mind’s-eye, psychic eddies swirled around his eyes, which were dark and bottomless, as though he were always mid-Push. Irene’s hand paused on her sketchbook as the man looked at her, considering her.

She Watched his face, which shifted as various decisions flitted across it. He knew who she was. He knew she was afraid. She did the breathing exercises she had coached Erik on, but anxiety still flooded her veins, her heart pumping, adrenaline racing, as though she were in a fight for her life, which maybe she was. “Please,” she said, knowing she was speaking to a heart that had shriveled and blackened to nothing long ago.

“What exactly are you asking for, my child?”

“…Please don’t kill me.” Her mother would have been strong. Her mother would have said, “You can kill me if you like, but I won’t help you.” But Irene was not her mother—not a fraction as good, not a fraction as brave—and all she wanted, in that instant, more than she wanted her mother or Raven or Erik, was not to die. “Please don’t make me… do anything to myself.”

“Why would I do that?” the Pusher asked, almost kindly. “I like this future. I know you’ve seen it, too. I know you know we win. I know how you die, and it’s not by my hands.”

And, in spite of herself, something strong lifted its head in Irene’s chest and made her say, “Then you have to let Erik go, too. Because I know how he dies, too. And it’s not here. Not now.”

The Pusher surveyed her for a long moment. The future flickered across his face. Irene was bad with expressions—the way a face contorted, the way facial features moved and stretched and contracted, they were all embedded in minute microdecisions that changed all the time, and so the faces she Watched shifted and blurred all the time, too, until they were composites of disdain and joy and confusion, rage and serenity. And then he turned and went back inside to tell the Mover that was beating Erik to death to stand down.

Irene wiped her sweat palms on her dress. She wasn’t out of the woods yet.

A moment later, the Pusher was walking down the steps again, the Mover flanking him. He stopped when he got to the step Irene was sitting on. Irene turned her head until it was tilted in his direction. His expression was clearer than expressions normally were for her; he was looking at her with something approaching compassion. He rummaged in his breast pocket and held out—

—a business card.

Irene reached out hesitantly and managed to grasp it on the second try. “Call me,” the Pusher said, “once you’ve grown out of this childish delusion that you can stop me. And maybe you’ll be able to see your mother again.”

And then he and the Mover were gone, melting into the crowds. Irene ran shaking fingers over the business card. Braille letters pushed up at her. ESMAIL NUR, it read, and then a phone number. Braille. He’d known he was going to meet her on those steps. And he’d been prepared.

She took a moment to collect herself before she went back inside, standing over Erik’s battered mess of a body. When he blinked back into consciousness and tilted his face toward her, she scowled and said, “You’re welcome.”

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

WOULD YOU RATHER

Erik was quiet and sullen on the ride back home. He kept thinking about Nur, and the way he’d so effortlessly gotten under his skin. He kept thinking about Charles and the sheer confusion in his eyes when he’d pulled back and realized he’d been bleeding. But most of all, he kept thinking of the way Nur had said, _“I know how this story ends.”_

When he got back to Akihiro’s place, there were customers, so Erik and Irene went in through the side door and stepped into the kitchenette on the other side of the beaded curtain. Charles, looking pale and nauseous, was holding a cold mug of tea that had only been sipped from. He looked at them—looked at Erik’s new bruises, the way he winced as he sat when his ribs twinged at him in protest—and didn’t say anything, just stretched out his hand and took Erik’s and said, “I could’ve told you that wouldn’t work.”

“Developed those Watcher abilities yet?” Erik joked as Irene set herself to making a fresh pot of tea. “Maybe you can Watch us a way out of this, because our resident seer keeps seeing dead bodies.”

Charles shook his head. Even that tiny motion meant he had to pause and breathe deeply to get his bearings. “Sorry. Sometimes I… feel this itch, like I want to set something down on paper. But you know I’ve never been any good at drawing.” Erik smiled. He remembered Charles leaving little stick figures on their grocery lists, on the notes he left before he went to the bagel shop for breakfast. They had been terrible, Charles’s atrocious, crabbed handwriting in little lopsided speech bubbles.

“Do you remember how we used to play that morbid version of ‘Would You Rather’?” Charles smiled, just a tiny ghost of nostalgia. “Can I ask you something?” he said softly, like it was the most important thing on the planet, under the sounds of the kettle boiling. Irene was staring out the window—or not staring, but at least pretending not to listen. Charles shrugged. “Would you rather die or be a Division puppet?”

“I don’t know,” Charles whispered, and they sat there for a long time, Charles’s thumb rubbing across Erik’s knuckles, like he’d known how much his non-answer had struck him to the bone.

— ⓧ —

A VIEW TO A MYSTERY

When Akihiro’s customers were gone, they sat around the kitchenette table. “Can you—?” Erik began to ask Akihiro.

Charles was shaking his head. He said, “I already asked him if he could find the suitcase. It’s being Shadowed.”

“There’s no way you would’ve been able to find a Shadow on your own, in Hong Kong, without any money,” Erik pointed out.

“Then I must have Shadowed it myself,” Charles said.

“Can you sense where it is?” Irene asked.

“I don’t remember anything about doing it.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Irene said, more gently than Erik would have expected from her.

Charles examined her for a moment, then nodded his head slowly and closed his eyes. Sunlight, incongruously cheerful, streamed through the cracked window and the linen flower-pattern curtains that danced in the breeze coming in. He took a deep, steadying breath, and then opened his eyes and said, “It’s that way,” and pointed in the vague direction of a kitchen cupboard.

“Come on,” Akihiro said, “let’s get you a better view.”

Looking out from a balcony on an abandoned office building about a block down, Erik could see most of Hong Kong spread out before him. The direction Charles had pointed, north-northwest, gave them a good view of not more skyscrapers that would block out the skyline but a lower-set, more industrial section of the city. Irene doodled in her composition book; Charles stared out as though hoping something would trigger a memory. Erik leaned forward, felt the wind whipping through his hair, and just breathed. He rarely got a moment to take in the places he lived like this, too busy on the streets below, running cons, placing bets, hiding from enforcers. The sun had ducked behind a patina of clouds, casting a dull gloom on everything, but it still seemed brighter than it had the day before.

Charles made everything brighter.

“I don’t know what we’re looking for,” Akihiro said at last. “I can’t tell you which of these buildings is being Shadowed. It’s not like a black hole in my senses; it’s just… unnoticeable.” 

“Yeah,” Erik sighed. Still, he couldn’t regret it. The wind had recolored Charles’s cheeks, and he’d pressed closed against the chill of the air. Erik thought about putting an arm around him, then told himself that life was short and did it. Charles leaned in against his touch. “Come on, kid,” he said, “let’s—” and then stopped. Because that wasn’t right.

Irene frowned at him. “Erik?”

“Give me that,” he said, and snatched the composition book out of her hand. Irene had sketched the city skyline as seen from their position, rectangles and squares, apartment towers and shorter, squatter buildings, offices and shops, all of them folding in on each other and overlapping as she had drawn without lifting the pencil until it was a recursive window onto boxes within boxes, windows and defining architectural features just hinted at with a novice’s skill. He held it up against the view, comparing each building, checking it off against the real skyline that he could see.

“What are you doing?” Irene snapped.

“Looking,” Erik said. He angled the sketchbook toward Charles and Akihiro. “Don’t you see—can’t you see that there’s something different about her drawing?”

Charles shrugged. Akihiro snorted. “What _is_ that?”

“It’s the city,” Erik answered for Irene. “You can’t see that it’s off?”

“Man, it looks like some abstract art shit. A Kandinsky.”

Maybe it was because Erik had spent more time staring at Irene’s drawings, but against the backdrop of Hong Kong, her lines took on texture and dimension. He could see the city as she did, the farther buildings shrinking in the background, the closer ones looming large, taking up heavy, definite strokes. That building there—Irene had drawn, jerking the pencil in to illustrate the shattery beauty of the textured windows. That building there—it stood proud and austere on the page. And that building there—

“There’s a building missing,” Erik said. “That one.” He pointed toward a mid-size tower, scaffolding swarming thick around the building’s exterior. Charles and Akihiro crowded close to look. Irene took her sketchbook back with unsteady hands. “I thought Shadows weren’t supposed to be effective against Watchers like Irene.”

Akihiro snorted. “Yeah. They’re not supposed to be able to Shadow whole buildings, either.”

They looked at Charles, whose gaze slowly flitted from the building to stare back at them. He spread his hands helplessly. _What are you becoming?_ Erik thought, but Charles still looked like Charles—flirty, silly, seductive, bright, optimistic Charles. Not a superweapon. Not someone who was swiftly becoming the most powerful psychic alive. Just the Charles he loved.

“So now we know where it is,” Erik said, coaxing their attention away from Charles. “Now we just have to figure out how to get it.”

“That’s going to be tough,” Irene pointed out. “The moment we decide on a course of action, Division will know. They… they have better Watchers than me.” And Erik knew she was thinking about her mother, and felt a wave of surprise and affection. She had told him what Esmail Nur had promised her, and had not, even for a moment, sounded wistful or torn. The thought of seeing her mother again was nothing to her compared to doing the right thing, to getting her mother back the _right_ way. He couldn’t remember having that optimism, that goodness, but he admired it in her.

A plan was coming to Erik now in fits and starts, a slow illumination of the mind. “What if,” he said, “we didn’t _know_ what we were going to do? If we built a plan, but no one knew all of it? Would they be able to track us then?”

“Maybe not,” Irene said. “But how are you going to do that?”

“Haven’t you heard?” Erik said. “I’m psychic.”

— ⓧ —

RED LETTERS

Back in Akihiro’s cigar shop, Akihiro dug in the desk that the cashier’s station sat on top of and came out with a set of red envelopes—the kind that parents put money in to give children when the New Year turned. Erik spread them out on the kitchen table, along with Irene’s composition book and a set of pens and note cards. “I’ll write letters to each of you. You’ll open them at a specific time, and follow the instructions inside. The last letter, I’ll write to myself… and wipe the memory of coming up with this plan. So none of us will know what we do next until we do it, and that way we won’t have intentions for Division to track.”

“I have a million questions,” Irene said.

“Pick three,” Erik suggested.

“Okay,” Irene said. “Where are you going to find a Wiper?”

“Can you do it?” Erik asked Charles.

Charles shook his head. “I don’t…” he said, sounding dazed. As time went on, he drifted farther and farther from them, as though fevered. Erik had seen him concealing bloody Kleenex in his pocket. “I don’t know how. I could try to… Push you into forgetting? But I…” He scrubbed at his face. When he resurfaced, he looked a little more lucid. “I don’t want to experiment on your mind,” he said clearly.

Erik nodded. Almost involuntarily, he reached out and squeezed Charles’s shoulder; Charles leaned into the touch, smiling at him, before the fever-daze descended over his expression again. Erik took a deep, steadying breath, then turned to Akihiro. “When he arrived in the city, Charles went to a Wiper who took away his memories of hiding the case. Can you find him for us?” Akihiro grunted, which Erik took as a yes. “Next question.” 

“You know they’ll be sending their Sniffers to track us back from the restaurant to here so that they can get their hands on Charles,” Irene said. “Shouldn’t we move?”

“Probably,” Erik admitted. “But we’ll work fast. Besides, if what I have in mind works… it won’t matter if they find us. Last question.”

“Are you _insane?”_

“Very possibly,” Erik said. He spread out several note cards, writing on each one: ESMAIL NUR, DIVISION SNIFFERS, DIVISION WATCHERS, and then beginning to list the actions that each would take the moment the Watchers’ view of what they were going to do next became cloudy. Over the next twenty minutes, as Akihiro unearthed a box of cigars that smelled like rich, earthy tobacco with a hint of something like chocolate; Irene mopped Charles’s forehead as he mumbled, increasingly delirious. And Erik was absorbed in the post-it notes and index cards and color-coded pens as he tried to work out what each person knew, and what they wanted to know, and how they would respond, in the way a Watcher would, but with his mind alone.

“Charles,” he said after long moments had passed. “Charles, look at me.”

Charles opened his eyes with difficulty and focused on him. He was having one of his less-cogent moments. Erik took his hand, rubbing his thumb over the knuckles. “Charles,” he said. “I need you to make some decoy papers. Do you remember the papers you read on the ship? Everything you stole? I need you to make a copy of those papers, okay?”

He pushed another red envelope toward him, and Charles lifted it and and concentrated. In his hands, it began to morph into something else. It was just another psychic talent—he wasn’t actually changing the envelope itself, he was just impressing an image of something else onto it. Anyone who looked at it, touched it, would perceive the papers that Charles stole. Erik didn’t know how long it would last; the stronger the psychic, the longer the Shift would endure. A psychic as strong as Charles was becoming… maybe it would last forever. When he was finished, a sheaf of official looking papers—Erik thumbed through them and saw maps, timetables, medical reports—sat in front of him.

“Good,” Erik said. “Now the suitcase.”

Index cards for Irene, printed with a brailler Akihiro had run out and retrieved from the market, meticulously ordered and slipped into the little red packet. Instructions for Akihiro, printed on the front and back side of one card, with a promise that it wasn’t too onerous and that they’d leave him alone the second the plan went into effect. A letter to himself.

By the time Akihiro found the Wiper, they were ready.

Erik handed Akihiro his envelope and said, “Thank you.”

Akihiro grunted, “I made a promise to her Ma. This is me keeping it.”

Erik handed Irene her envelope and said, “When this is done, you hide, okay? No shame, no judgment. Just _hide._ ”

Irene blinked at him through her dark glasses. And then she threw her arms around him. Erik inhaled sharply, a little startled, catching a breath of her floral shampoo, faded and warped by the smells of running around Hong Kong for two days without a shower. But he put his arms around her and squeezed, and she briefly buried her face in his shoulder, and he wondered if this was what his mother felt, the last time she embraced him. “You too, okay?” she said.

“I won’t remember this,” Erik reminded her kindly. “But I don’t think I’ll need any reminder to hide.”

The last envelope he pocketed. When he looked up, Charles was watching him carefully. “And me?” he asked softly.

Erik kissed him.

And it was like the first kiss, casually dropped on Erik’s lips after their second assignation, the first not in a casino bathroom. And it was like the last kiss, a kiss Erik could barely remember, a few days after Coney Island. Maybe Charles had kissed him goodbye absentmindedly before he went out to run another con, or maybe the kiss had been the night before, as they lay tangled in bedsheets together—it was so everyday, so run-of-the-mill, he couldn’t remember, the only thing notable about that day being Charles’s disappearance. It was both kisses and every kiss in between, a kaleidoscope of memory, scenes from a love story flashing before his eyes. And then he pulled back and it was over, and it was just Charles in his arms, but also the embodiment of everything he’d ever wanted, everything he stood to lose.

“That,” Erik said. “That is what I want you to remember.”

Charles smiled, tremulous and beautiful. His eyes were very clear. Erik kissed him again, one last time.

Then he took a deep breath and got into the cab that was idling at the curb for him, ready to find the Wiper, ready to lose Charles all over again. 

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

INTERLUDE: ANOTHER VERSION OF THE TRUTH

7:35 PM.

Akihiro unsealed his envelope and groaned. Across the table, Irene ran her fingers across the brailled letters Erik had painstakingly impressed onto the note cards. She read her instructions once, then again, as if in disbelief. Finally, she snorted and rose, heading toward the side door, where another cab waited. “Well,” she said, and picked up the decoy suitcase that Charles had Shifted. “See you on the other side.”

“What does yours say?” Charles asked Akihiro.

“You’re not gonna like it,” Akihiro said.

He was right. Charles didn’t like it.

They met Division in an open-air parking lot on the waterfront, very close to where Erik had found him again. Akihiro had a tight grip on his arm, one which would look to the Division agents like he was making sure Charles wouldn’t run—as if he was in any state for that—but which really was responsible for holding Charles upright. The fever was crashing back in on him, like a tidal wave; he could feel it, as sure as a beachgoer could see the wave rising up and know that their life was about to end. The Man was waiting for them. Esmail Nur. The end of Charles’s life as he knew it.

“You make us chase you halfway around the world and then let a _hack_ like Akihiro Howlett bring you in?” He said, soft and deadly. His fingers closed on Charles’s upper arm like a vise.

“I’m _sick,_ ” Charles said, his voice petering out into a whine. “I need help.”

“You have no idea _what_ you are,” He snarled. He threw an envelope—not the red envelopes in which Erik had concealed their hopes for the future, but a thick manilla folder stuffed full of bills—to Akihiro, who snatched it out of the air and bared his teeth. The Man barely seemed to notice. He dragged Charles toward their towncar until Charles stumbled and almost went down on his knees as the vertigo swarmed over him. In the car, Charles rested his head against the window and thought of Erik.

They were driven to a blank, nondescript hotel with blank, nondescript suites, of which the Man had the blankest and most nondescript. Charles stared at the landscapes of Hong Kong on the mint-green walls as the Man, his motions turned gentle once he’d seen what a bad state Charles was in, filled a syringe from a small glass bottle. “An immunosuppressant,” he explained to Charles. “It works on your body’s T-cells, preventing them from recognizing your changing physiology as a threat.”

“I know what an immunosuppressant does,” Charles rasped.

“Then you know you needed one months ago,” the Man said almost kindly. “Why did you run from us?”

“Why did you capture me?” Charles shot back, not flinching as the hollow-tipped needle found its way into his vein. He’d had worse. He wasn’t looking at him. If he didn’t look at him, the Man couldn’t Push him. 

“Charles,” the Man said, a little reproachfully. He wasn’t acting like a man with his prisoner. “Charles, you’re confused. I should have expected it—I should have realized, with your psychic powers boosted so much, that you would absorb the memories and feelings of the other prisoners. Charles, you were never a captive. You were my fellow agent. My partner.”

“No,” Charles said.

“You were the best,” the Man said, almost wistfully, almost jealously. “The very best. You demanded that you be the next one to trial the serum. I was against it; but you convinced me. Sometimes I almost think you Pushed me into agreeing to it. You were adamant you would be the first one to survive. The only one strong enough. And you were.”

Charles stumbled blindly backward. He fell off the ottoman he’d been perched on, crawled on his hands and knees behind the coffee table in the hopes of escaping the words. They bored into his brain, seeming more and more right all the time. Was he being Pushed? Was this what it felt like? Had he accidentally made eye contact? Were, even now, the Man’s eyes pulsing black and endless as he stared at Charles, as he implanted memory into his mind?

Or was this blazing pain, of his memories stripping back, of new memories unfolding beneath them, because… he was telling the truth?

_I should have realized, with your psychic powers boosted so much, that you would absorb the memories and feelings of the other prisoners._

“What background did you invent for yourself, that you then reflected in the eyes of others? Who is this ‘Charles Xavier’ that you invented? He didn’t really think he was an amateur, did he? The way he held the gun? The skill with which he Pushed his pursuers? How could you have gotten this far without training, without that spark for which we recruited you years ago?”

“No,” Charles said. “No, it’s not true.”

Erik. He clung to Erik. He clung to the moment in which Erik had looked at him, blank at first, but then recognition had flared in his eyes—

No. No, he’d hadn’t Pushed him. He would know, wouldn’t he? He would know if he invented that whole beautiful story of their love affair, by accident, because he saw an attractive man and needed a way out of that parking garage, out of danger—

“You’re starting to remember,” the Man said gently. He knelt on the ground next to Charles, who was staring, terrified, adrift, at the coffee table. The Man gently tipped Charles’s head toward him, until he was staring into his eyes, his dark, hypnotic, world-encompassing eyes. _“Let me help.”_

 _—_ and he _remembered_.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

INTERLUDE: TUNNEL VISION

The moment she entered the Shadowed building, Irene was blind.

She couldn’t even Watch the entrance. The cab driver had taken pity on her, with the telescopic cane out that she kept in her satchel for emergencies when she needed to actually _look_ blind, and walked her to the entrance. It was an abandoned office building, Akihiro had managed to tell her that much.

So she just had to search an empty office building, under construction, for a suitcase, with her main sense totally overwhelmed by the Shadow Charles had cast over this entire building. Great. This wasn’t a death trap at all.

 _I have faith in you,_ Erik had stenciled on the index card. 

And maybe he was right to. Because this place, the smell of it—she’d smelled it in her dreams.

In her dreams, she could usually see. Or—not see— _Watch_ , everything in the shifting contours of her sketchbook. But not in this dream. In this dream, she was blind, well and truly blind, and she was holding a rolling suitcase that bumped her shin whenever she walked too fast. In her other hand was a cane. And she smelled the smell that was redolent in the air all around her: sawdust and neglect, construction and the old being built over. She had Watched herself go through this building, she realized. Because she hadn’t been concentrating on the case, or the building itself, which were Shadowed. But because in her dream, she had been Watching herself.

Hesitantly, her cane tapping on the hard concrete floor, navigating obstacles that loomed out at her out of nowhere, she made her way across the ground floor to the rickety lift in the center of the building. Her cane tapped against construction materials, and she moved slowly but steadily across the floor, making minute changes every time she ran into something. When her cane hit the chain links of the elevator shaft, rattling in protest against it, she hesitantly reached out, remembering how in the dream she had shoved at the sliding door and climbed inside. The elevator doors shifted against her arms.

In her dream, there had been a key. She ran her fingers down the shaft and found the key to operate the lift still in the keyhole. Like fate had arranged it. Or a better Watcher than her had.

She turned the key and pressed the fourth button from the bottom.

The elevator drew itself up around her, the brief heaviness of an elevator rising settling around her bones. When the contraption ground to a stop, she pushed aside the elevator doors on the fourth floor like she had on the first and stepped out onto foreign blank territory, her cane tapping ahead of her. _Left_ , instinct whispered, and she floated left, like a kite barely controlled by the force of a child holding a string but buffeted by stronger and more mysterious winds. This section of the floor was much more bare. In the distance, she could hear tarps fluttering in the wind, and a chill came over her. Was part of the building open to the air? At a particularly loud flap from a loose tarp, she startled, turned to the noise, and her cane swept into nothingness.

She froze. The edge of—something, of some ragged corner of construction—was just feet from her. It might be a drop of a couple of feet, or something else that would be easy for a sighted person—maybe there was a ladder below, waiting for anyone who needed to get down over the edge. Or it might be a void straight back down to the ground floor. _I have faith in you,_ Erik had said. What a total crock of shit. She wanted to cry. Damn you, Erik Lehnsherr. Damn you and your faith.

Because she couldn’t just turn around anymore, could she? She’d brought him this mess. She had to see it through.

She took a deep breath. Her mother had seen this, long ago, put all of the events into motion. Had arranged favors from Akihiro, had spoken prophecy to Erik’s mother. Had blinded her for a reason. She must have known. Must have known that this wouldn’t kill her.

Or she’d been insane. But if she believed that, the entire fabric of her life shredded apart.

She took another step forward, and another. Let out a held breath when her cane found no more edges, no more precipices. Kept going, one step at a time, until, like in her dream, her cane impacted something solid, something that clanged with metallic hollowness, and she groped forward and found a set of lockers. She ran her fingers over each locker—number lock, with embossed letters so she could read them, and the numbers indicating which locker it was were also embossed. This was where her dream ended, or at least faded into so much static. But at this point, Erik had told her what to do next.

“This better work, Erik,” she said.

With her fingers, she found locker 4201, and turned the numbers to the combination Erik had given her. The click as it opened was anticlimactic, but the sweetest thing she’d ever heard.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

HOME

Erik stirred. He was lying face-down on wooden planks. His head was pounding—not like a concussion or a hangover, like someone had reached inside his skull and turned his brain inside out. He’d never been Wiped before. It was an unpleasant feeling.

The last thing he remembered was coming up with this insane idea—the red envelopes, the secret messages.

He pushed himself upright. He was on one of the houseboats swaying in the bay. It was cramped with old furniture, fishing nets, the detritus of a life. He thought he spied one of Akihiro’s cigars in the corner. He stretched, his back popping satisfyingly, and then clambered to his feet.

Through the long line of the houseboat he could spy a man sitting by the prow, smoking and staring off into the distance. He wondered if he’d already paid him. Erik reached for his wallet, wondering if the Wiper had taken the rest of his money while he’d been unconscious, but found that it was full—or, at least, full minus the cab fare he’d probably taken to get here. He sighed. He hated haggling, especially when he couldn’t remember what had already been said. He walked out to the prow and said, “How much do I owe you?”

The man tapped his pipe against the wood siding of the boat and said, “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Erik said dubiously. “You wiped my memory out of the goodness of your heart?”

“Long ago,” the man said, his weathered face and wrinkled hands at odds with his strong, resonant voice, “a woman came to me. She paid me for two Wipes. The first, a man, came to me three days ago. The second, you, came to me tonight. You owe me nothing.” He took a deep drag from his pipe, then blew out in the air. “However, I would not refuse a tip.”

On the dock, Erik fumbled for the red envelope in his other pocket. The sun was setting over the Hong Kong waterfront, scattering red and purple light everywhere, silhouetting the buildings against the sky and the seabirds cawing, baying for fish. It reminded him of watching the sunrise from his tiny window in a towering red-painted residential tower, horses frolicking on his wallpaper, and maybe that’s why he wasn’t surprised when he withdrew an index card from his red envelope with only two words on it.

GO HOME.

So he went home.

The light in the hallway leading to his apartment door had burned out. He took the keys from his pocket, a little surprised to find that they had survived the last two days and he hadn’t left them on a Stitch’s table as he was being put back together or on the floor of a restaurant as he was being taken apart. He wondered if he had left something for himself in his apartment. He wondered if Irene or Akihiro or Charles would be waiting there to tell him what to do next. He wondered if something had gone wrong, and he would stare out the tiny window his apartment till dawn, and never know what happened or what he should’ve done differently.

It took him a while to realize the kitchen light was on. “Charles?” he called, heading toward the light. “Irene?”

“Not quite,” said Julian Keller, and Erik’s own gun floated down from the ceiling to nudge against his head.

Erik put his hands in the air, for all the good it would do him. Keller was obviously here to kill him. “Mr. Nur has decided you’ve outlived your usefulness,” Keller said. Erik tried concentrating on the gun, threading his awareness through the metal, but Keller pushed back fiercely and Erik’s powers bounced off of the gun and rebounded on him. “Don’t try to fight. I mean, it would make it more interesting, but it’s also kind of… sad. Like watching a bunny rabbit try kung fu against a wolf.”

“Screw you,” Erik told him.

Keller grinned. “Ashes, ashes. And they all… fall… down.”

He Moved the trigger.

The hammer clicked uselessly.

Keller frowned. “What—”

Erik moved. He put all of the telekinetic force he could muster into his fist and threw a punch, just like Keller had done at the restaurant; the force of it seemed to multiply through the air between him and Keller, and he was punched backward into the table. Erik must have just caught him on the solar plexus, because he was rasping dangerously. The gun, which hadn’t worked right since he’d tried to menace Irene with it, fell from the air and into Erik’s hand; he tossed it aside and telegraphed another punch, which crashed into Keller and the table and this time shoved him far enough that he hit the stove on the other side of the kitchen.

His heart was loud in his ears and the urge to just… drift away from it all, to drift out of his body, was strong. But stronger than that was his adrenaline, and for once, the first images that flashed in front of his eyes weren’t of being ten years old and strapped to that table as a Stitch unraveled his muscles and exposed his bone, but Irene’s fingers tapping her pencil, her lips forming the words, _“You’re such a shitty psychic that it can’t hurt,”_ Charles’s wan, flushed smile, Charles’s fingers caressing his own. It had given him a quick burst of strength, strength enough that he’d managed to tap into Keller’s trick of delivering telekinetic blows, and now as the images of Irene and Charles faded, instead of letting himself dissociate he focused on his breath, on his knuckles clutching the doorframe, on the buzz of the electric kitchen light, on the clamor of Keller staggering back to his feet.

He threw his mind into the single chef’s knife and paring knife and all the cutlery he owned, and Keller threw his hand up to flip the table; the forks and the chef’s knife thudded into it, but the paring knife was better-aimed, and scored a slice through his thumb and the meat of his hand. He cursed. Erik grinned; first blood.

Keller jerked his head toward Erik and Erik felt a colossal force bear down on him and try to slam him into the wall; he pushed back, feeling his feet scrape against the carpet as Keller’s Move overpowered his own, but with his free hand he gestured at a kitchen drawer and yanked it out, smashing it into the back of Keller’s head. At once, Keller’s force field dropped. Erik advanced on him, one hand poised to shield, the other fisted in preparation for another punch. Breath. The press of his nails into his palm. Keller cursing. He was here, he was present, he was alive—

Keller sprang up to a crouch and, without even trying telekinesis, barreled into Erik. He caught him around the waist, and dragged him off his center of balance; Erik grunted and fell. He managed to drive his elbow telekinetically into Keller’s jaw, and Keller snarled with pain, but in the next instance his concentration broke and they were flailing on the ground like puppies. Whenever Erik tried to summon up the focus to push Keller off of him, Keller broke it immediately. In a second Keller had him in a chokehold, and he wasn’t going to let Erik tap out; Erik had learned quickly how to do battle in the psychic realm, but Keller had been trained psychically _and_ physically, and if one wasn’t going to let him win this fight, the other surely would.

Keller dragged him upright, and black spots danced before his eyes; he fell into it, concentrated fiercely on the sensation of choking, and thrust his elbow backwards, putting all his energy into a telekinetic blow. Keller screamed as it caught him in the ribs, and his grip loosened; Erik scrambled away, his hand groping for the chef’s knife embedded in the kitchen table, but it was stuck fast—Keller had doubled over to try and catch his breath—no—he was going for an ankle holster—

“Ever tried to deflect a bullet?” Keller rasped, his voice raw and breathless from the fight. He sighted down the barrel. Erik threw his hand out—

And then Keller choked—

—and fell to the floor.

In the doorway, Akihiro wiped the Bowie knife, bloody where he’d thrust it through Keller’s throat, on his jeans. He made a face. Breathing hard, Erik stared at him and slowly registered that he wasn’t going to have to see whether his telekinesis was up to blocking the mass of a bullet multiplied by its acceleration. 

“I had him,” was all he could think to say.

Akihiro snorted. “Sure. You got any beer?”

He waited for Erik to steady himself, check the fridge, and shake his head before he sighed dramatically and leaned against the countertop. “I’m supposed to tell you that Division has Charles,” he said. 

“Are you also supposed to tell me not to do anything stupid?”

“Wasn’t in the note.”

“Good,” Erik said. “Where is he?”

— ⓧ —

SOMETHING MISSING

Erik spent the last of his cash on cab fare to the address Akihiro had given him. One way or another, he suspected that he wasn’t going to be needing it.

Division had rented out a nondescript apartment building in the middle of the city, a much squatter and wider building than Erik’s, built from brick and in the fashion of the English colonists who had built this sector of Hong Kong to resemble home as much as possible. The doorman let him in, and on instinct, he hit the button for the penthouse floor. The elevator shimmered in gilt and architectural flourishes that drove home how out of his class he was, though once upon a time Charles would have felt right at home. It spat Erik out in a long hallway which led to a sitting room, with bedrooms cascading off the hall. He moved past the empty bedrooms and into the sitting area, where Esmail Nur was waiting for him, his legs crossed as he lounged in a wing-backed leather chair.

“Erik,” Nur said pleasantly. “Where is Mr. Keller?”

“Dead,” Erik said.

“I see. Are you here to kill me as well?”

“I’m here for Charles,” Erik said, not meeting his eyes, trying to keep his words firm. That _voice_. Those slow, deliberate vowels that had followed him in nightmares for years. “If you let him go, I’ll let you go.”

“Let him _go?”_ Nur said, his voice rich with amusement. “Charles? What do you think of that?”

Footsteps behind him. Erik turned.

Charles shut the door behind him and smiled at Erik. He looked—he looked _healthy_ , no longer sweaty and flushed and pale and bloodless in turns, he was dressed in a conservatively cut suit, the kind that Charles had never favored, preferring more modern cuts that showed off his better qualities and helped him catch the eye of his next conquest. “I think it’s cute,” Charles said, and his voice was almost unrecognizable. Smooth and oil-slick, gentle but with a sharp cutting edge that Erik had heard before, but never directed at him. “Chivalrous, even. But I don’t need your chivalry, Erik.”

“Charles,” Erik said. This Charles shimmered in front of him like a mirage, but he was still _Charles_ , Erik had to trust that. “Charles, let’s go, let’s get away from here—”

Charles laughed. “You didn’t tell him?” he asked Nur.

“I thought you would want to do the honors.”

“You’re cruel, Esmail,” Charles pouted, and then turned to Erik. “Erik,” he said, “do you remember when the big storm hit and knocked out all our power and heat— _again_ —and we made a blanket fort out of the couch and armchair to sleep in? How we put up flashlights like candles and huddled there, and you told me all about the first con you ever ran, and listened to the rain make the radio fritz as music stuttered from the speakers?”

“I remember,” Erik said, his mouth dry.

Charles stepped closer. He was close enough to kiss. But his eyes didn’t track Erik’s mouth; his gaze remained friendly, disinterested. “It never happened, Erik,” he said gently. “All those memories, those beautiful years… they were my invention. I Pushed you into believing we had a past so that you’d help me. And now that you’ve helped me, I don’t need you anymore.”

“That’s not true,” Erik said fiercely. Charles’s blue eyes flashed at him. A little part of Erik, a part he never wanted to listen to, reminded him that he’d exposed himself to a Pusher, that nothing he remembered or thought could be trusted. The rest of him shoved that part aside and reminded himself that it wasn’t a Pusher, it was _Charles_ , and trusting Charles was like trusting himself.

“It is,” Charles said. “It was a _con,_ Erik. Surely you of all people should understand that?”

Behind him, Nur chuckled. “Don’t feel too bad,” he said. “Better men than you have fallen victim to that Push of Charles’s.”

No. It was a _trick,_ a con, like Charles had said—maybe he was playing along because Erik had told him to, maybe Nur had Pushed him into believing this—Erik had never been one for optimism, one for hope, but he found it came easily now. “So what?” he demanded, staring straight at Charles, ignoring Nur’s presence entirely. He’d found something more important than his fear. “Are _you_ going to kill _me?”_

“Erik,” Charles said, reaching forward like a striking snake, his fingers grasping Erik’s chin tightly, “you’re going to kill yourself. I just want to play with you a little first.”

And then, finally, Charles kissed him. And Erik melted into it—no Push necessary—he’d been conditioned, after all, to give Charles anything he wanted when he kissed him like that. Almost involuntarily, Erik’s arms came up around Charles’s body, and he held him close, tenderly, as though if he kissed him thoroughly enough the delusion would dissolve and Charles would be _his Charles_ again. Charles’s fingers on his jaw tightened, and he deepened the kiss, and Erik thought of skylarks in flight in the New York dawn, and warm cups of coffee left in his hand, and nights with the windows thrown open for a breeze and secrets heating their breath.

Behind them, a phone rang.

It was a bare, piercing bell-tone, the ringtone of someone who disdained ringtones, and Charles and Erik broke apart, with Charles moving past him as though he hadn’t just _kissed the life out of him_ to stand by Nur’s side. Nur, looking curious, took his cell phone from the table and flipped it open. Erik, breathing hard, could just make out the tinny sound of a voice he recognized on the other end of the line.

“If you wanna know where the case is, you have to let him live,” Irene said, her words distant and small but still audible.

“And why would I do that?” Nur said, amused. “We know where the case is; Charles was there when you figured it out together.”

“You don’t know the combination,” Irene said. “He does.”

Nur snapped the phone closed and surveyed Erik with a new coldness. He was assessing him as a threat now, not a curiosity to be toyed with and then discarded. Beside him, Charles was turned toward him as though his entire attention were taken up by Nur, as though Erik were less than an afterthought of an afterthought, and Erik _ached._ Maybe this wasn’t a trick. Maybe Charles really thought—what he’d said.

But he and Charles had still had those years together. He was sure of it.

“Well,” Nur said, standing. “It seems that we’re going on a trip.”

Nur drove; Charles settled in the passenger seat next to him. Erik, now in handcuffs, was pushed into the back. He put his head against the window and watched the city at night flicker past him. He didn’t think he was going to get the chance to savor the view for much longer. He wished he could know if things were going according to plan or not. He wondered if Irene was safe. Hong Kong glittered at him, impenetrable and cold and totally devoid of any answers.

The building they’d identified as the only building in the city Watchers couldn’t see felt taller standing at the base of it than looking out on it from an office balcony several stories above. Nur took his elbow and dragged him upright; Charles stood looking curiously at the building, his arms around himself to protect himself from the chill of evening descending. They marched inside into a half-finished landscape of development; the roof was partially open, with scaffolding standing like all but the wood-skeletal frame of the building had been stripped away, and cinderblock and I-beams and tarps covering construction equipment lay everywhere. Nur flicked the switch by the door and a weak, dim series of bare lightbulbs flared to life. The footlights that were wired to power strips instead of the wall remained dim.

“Well?” Nur said.

Erik closed his eyes and hoped he knew what he was doing. “The note Charles wrote to himself said 4201,” he said. “So it’s on the fourth floor.”

They took the elevator up. It was a rickety temporary thing, the kind where you had to shove open the door to the elevator cage before entering and exiting. They had to stand close enough that Erik could feel Charles’s body heat as he looked around, politely interested in the place where he’d desperately hid the suitcase from Division just days ago, but no more. “It’s not too late to stop this, you know,” Erik told him quietly. “It’s not too late to just… leave. Leave them to their fights, to this war between Division and the psychics. Leave them to destroy themselves.”

“Oh, Erik,” Charles sighed. “It’s been too late for me for a very long time.”

The elevator ground to a halt. Across a narrow catwalk was a set of lockers, each large enough for a suitcase, with a number embossed on it. 4201 was the leftmost locker, third row from the bottom.

“So what else was in this note of yours?” Nur asked.

“Two words,” Charles said, his eyes lingering on Erik. “I could probably guess the combination myself, but… I’d like Erik here to do the honors.”

Erik breathed. In and out. The feeling of his ribs expanding and contracting, the brush of his shirt against his skin, the blast of the air conditioner coming down from the ceiling, the way Charles’s proximity rose goosebumps on his skin. They walked across the catwalk and he reached for the number lock with his cuffed hands.

He set the dial to 102809.

It clicked open.

Charles smiled at him, that smile that would make men die for him. “It’s not real, Erik,” he said, almost gently. “We never went to Coney Island on October 28th, 2009. I implanted the number in you. You shouldn’t feel bad. You were never meant to see through it. You were just… a pawn, in a game of chess too large and important for you to fully comprehend.”

Charles reached for the locker door and pushed it open.

There was nothing inside.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

INTERLUDE: THE TIGER

 _When this is done, you hide, okay?_ Erik had told her. One last chance to save her from the tiger.

So Irene hid. She sprinted out of the building, breathing hard, gasping in relief once her Watcher’s sense of the world around her kicked back in. She stood there, shivering in her denim jacket on the street outside the building where the most dangerous secret in the world was concealed, and with determination, turned left and started walking. She had no destination in mind. By keeping her options open, by not making any choices until the moment she needed to, she could keep Watchers off her tail.

There was no way she could keep the Sniffers away, though.

She wandered through the city at night. Some buildings had gone dark, but more had lit up; office lobbies shining out into the dark, whether lone lights over security desks or brightly lit signs spanning glass walls. A little further down, there was neon _everywhere,_ bright tubes contorted into the shape of Chinese characters. On the plane ride to Hong Kong, her seatmate had been showing the boy in the aisle across from them how every Chinese character had a certain order the brushstrokes needed to go in. She wondered if the blurring, pulsing lights above her followed those rules; if the people at the neon factory made these signs one line at a time.

People jostled past her on the street. She felt safest in the crush of people, but a crowd wouldn’t necessarily stop Division from getting to her. Her only option was to keep moving, until… until Erik’s part was done and she could come back for him. On a whim, she went down to the subway and paused at a fork in the road between two subway lines. She closed her eyes and spun in a circle, and without thinking too hard about it caught the train she was facing when she opened them again, ignoring the glances that people gave the mad girl who was apparently determined to make herself lost.

She clung to the grips dangling from the ceiling and got out after four stops. She was back in the part of the city where Erik had taken her for lunch yesterday, or a place very similar; the fish market was quiet, or at least quieter, with people still hawking crab and lobster and crawfish from tanks, and tiny stalls and shops that sold noodles and buns were crammed into every alcove that could conceivably support a store. She soaked in the smells of food and picked one of the restaurants at random. There weren’t very many people in the dining room; she caught sight of a few people in chef’s uniforms who must have worked there lounging and chatting over steaming bowls that smelled of ginger and garlic. They paid no attention to her. Cautiously, she rested her hand on the banister of a flight of stairs and drifted up, not sure why, just feeling the faintest of pulls toward the upstairs that Watchers couldn’t explain.

She emerged in the buzzing low light of refrigerators, the kind you found in grocery stores, set along the walls. The upstairs were storage for the restaurant below; boxes stacked high with soy sauce bottles were everywhere. She picked up one and felt the plastic roll smoothly beneath her fingers. The logo was a tiger, rampant, its paws anchoring the banner that spelled out the sauce company’s name.

A noise behind her. She stilled. In her Watcher’s vision, she saw that behind her was Division’s premiere Sniffer, who Esmail Nur must have sent after her the moment she called. His expressionless face was turned toward her, sniffing the air. He was holding a knife. It was dripping with blood. She’d run out of time.

Irene wondered if the people downstairs were okay.

Slowly, slowly, she turned, as though it would be more honorable to face her death. “I’m not afraid of you,” she said slowly and clearly. “I know who you are.” A low growl sliced through the air in front of her, like claws. “Who you were,” she corrected herself. “I know you loved your son. And I know he loves you.” But such abstracts concept as _son_ and _love_ were lost on the animal before her. She took a shuddering step back in spite of herself, bumped into another crate of the tiger soy sauce. “I’m not afraid of you,” she whispered, trying to convince herself more than the beast ahead of her, who knew only prey and the hunt, not fear, not the frozen web it made in the bones. “I’m not afraid.”

The man raised the knife—

And behind him, two hands sealed over his head.

The man staggered. He dropped to his knees, then fell face-down on the floor. He didn’t get back up.

Irene, gasping, her heart pounding against her ribs, took in the old man who had saved her, his weathered face and wrinkled hands. “Who—who—what did you—”

“I Wiped his memory,” the Wiper said in a strong, resonant voice, in deeply accented English. “I had hoped to be able to only take away what Division left in his mind, but there was too much of it, his wounds were too great. So I took all of it.”

“Why—did Erik tell you to—?”

The Wiper moved away, disinterested, as though the conversation were already finished. “Your mother’s very proud of you,” he said, and then he was gone, and Irene was shivering among a decade’s worth of soy sauce, with Akihiro’s unconscious, memory-Wiped father lying on the floor between her and the door.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

NEVER TRUST A CON MAN

Charles shoved him into the row of lockers. He was laughing.

"Never trust a con man," he said over his shoulder to Nur, and then refocused those stunning blue eyes on Erik. "Where is it, Erik? Where did you have your charming little friends hide the case?"

"Your guess is as good as mine,” Erik said. “We used the same Wiper.”

Charles smiled meanly. “You’re a shitty gambler, Erik,” he said. He pushed him to the floor, bending to kneel over him, one hand in the center of his chest holding him down. “You should stay in the little leagues, where you belong, and _stay out of my way._ Tell me where it is, or things will get unpleasant.”

“I can’t,” Erik said. “And I wouldn’t.”

“If you figured it out once, you can figure it out again,” Charles said. “You just need some… incentive.”

He rucked up Erik’s shirt and placed his hand over his chest. For a moment, Erik thought that this whole conversation was about to take an abrupt turn into an altogether different kind of territory, and then his whole body exploded in crushing, familiar pain.

Oh. Charles had uncovered how to Stitch people together. Or Stitch them apart.

White-hot fire down his synapses as his bones creaked, as his muscles flowed into puddles and then reformed. Erik wasn’t actually sure if he screamed or not, or if the pain was too intense for that—he faded out, into whiteness, and only came back to himself when he was in more or less the same shape as he’d been when the pain had started. Slowly, streaks of color reformed into shapes, and he was staring into Charles’s eyes, a faintly amused expression on his face. This Charles was strange; this Charles was a stranger. The Charles he’d known had protested lethal rat-traps because he felt bad for the rats; this Charles tortured without thought, as a matter of course. This Charles took the knowledge of the worst days of Erik’s life and used them against him easily, as easily as someone else might wield a pen, or a gun.

Charles ran his fingers down Erik’s ribcage, as if counting them to see if he’d put the right number back together. “I’m still new at this,” he confessed. “I’m not sure how much someone might be able to take before permanent damage sets in. So it’s in your best interests to end this quickly. Where is the case?”

“You’re not a Stitch,” Erik wheezed. “You’re a Pusher. You could just Push me into thinking like you. But you won't. Because some part of you is still the man I knew. The man I never thought for a second made up a single moment of our relationship. The man who would never use his powers on me. Not for money. Or love.”

Charles’s eyes tightened around the edges. He brought his fist down on Erik’s sternum and everything was pain again. This time, Erik did scream. He came back to himself feeling ragged, his throat feeling like he had swallowed sandpaper. “I won’t—” he tried, but this time Charles didn’t even wait for him to finish his sentence before he locked his hands around his throat and psychically twisted his whole body into a screaming, flailing knot.

He was ten years old and he was coming apart at the seams. He was screaming for his mother, screaming for Charles, and no one was coming, because his mother was dead and Charles was dead or had never existed and all that was left was the darkness. He was waking up to an empty bed, his hand fluttering across the covers, searching for Charles—it was a week after Coney Island, and he was searching for someone who wasn’t there. He was screaming on the floor of a Hong Kong office building under construction, and he was going to die here, Irene’s lips shaping the word _horribly_ , and all for a case that he didn’t even care about, a case that wasn’t the reason he had come up with this mad scheme.

He resurfaced and realized he was lying on someone’s lap. Charles’s lap. His face hovered above him, his expression twisted in a moue of disapproval. He looked remote and beautiful and untouchable in that conservative suit. “I admit I thought you’d have broken already,” he said. “Should we try it the other way?”

Erik wet his lips. “What other way?” he rasped out.

“The one where Esmail threatens to kill me if you don’t tell us where the case is,” Charles said pleasantly.

“Charles, I don’t—” Nur said.

Erik laughed, a terrible scraping sound, his voice still hoarse from screaming. “After all the effort Division went through to get you back? Like I’d believe that.”

“Fine,” Charles said, “you’re right. Esmail wouldn’t do that.” He reached under his jacket and flashing in his hand, heavy and potent, was a gun. Charles looked comfortable with it, handling it even more deftly than he had when they’d met ( _again,_ he reminded himself—when they’d met _again_ ) at the car park. And then he put the gun to his own head. “I would, though.”

“What are you doing?” Erik asked frantically, his resolve short-circuited by the image of a gun at Charles’s head. “What— _why?_ Why?”

“I’d like to know that as well,” Nur said, but he didn’t seem inclined to pry the gun away from Charles’s head; rather, he seemed politely interested in seeing how this would play out.

“Because this is _my_ mistake,” Charles said. “ _My_ fault. I’m the one who panicked, I’m the one who ran from Division, if that case falls into the wrong hands it’s on _me._ And I’m the one who implanted those memories of our relationship into your head.” He smiled at Erik beatifically. “I know that even the sight of a gun to my head will break you. Like pain could never break you, no matter how familiar, no matter how much of your nightmares that kind of pain occupies. You can try to Move it away, of course. But you can barely move a die on a good day. Do you think you can push it away before I pull the trigger in your condition now?”

He was right. He was _right_ , damn him, that was the annoying thing about Charles, he was always _right._ “I don’t know!” Erik cried out, and that was truth, though it wasn’t the whole truth, and from the way Charles sneered he could tell that, too. “Please, I don’t—I don’t know where the case is, Charles. I don’t.”

“Then you should figure it out quickly,” Charles said, and clicked the safety off. And Erik remembered Irene.

She would’ve seen this, he thought. If he hadn’t told her otherwise—if he hadn’t told her to hide the case in a dumpster, or to take it and get out of town—she would’ve put it here for him to reach out and grab at exactly the right moment. It was a slim chance. It was a needle in a hay farm, a single suitcase in a city of seven million, and if it wasn’t there, if neither he nor she had foreseen the possibility that he would need the case, her with her Watching or him with his planning, he didn’t know what he’d do. But there was a chance.

“It’s under the tarp,” he said. It was the first place he set his eyes on. “That one.”

As Charles watched, the gun still aimed at his own head, Nur stepped over to the tarp several feet from them, flapping innocuously in the breeze from the unfinished roof, and pulled out a simple black suitcase, the durable, hard plastic kind with rolling feet. He unzipped it and spread the contents out for them all to see—a sheaf of papers, mismatched, with technical details scrolling over the pages, and a syringe, filled with a clear, unassuming liquid, in a glass case. Nur withdrew it from the case and tapped the syringe, as if checking the viscosity. A few tiny bubbles floated to the needle.

Charles was right. Freshly Stitched, battling PTSD and dissociation, Erik didn’t have the strength to try and wrest the gun from Charles’s grip, not when his life was on the line. But he could scramble to his knees, and then his feet, and stretch out his hand, and focus on his breath, painful and ragged in his chest, and the breeze on his skin, prickling goosebumps up and down, and Charles’s eyes, large and astonished and very blue, and when he clenched his fist the syringe was in it. He looked at it, sparkling pure and bright, and thought about it coursing through Charles’s veins, thought about what medications he must be on to keep it from melting his insides. He pressed the tip to the crook of his elbow.

Charles stood and faced him, his expression unreadable. “Go on,” Erik panted. “Push me before I inject it. Go on.”

“You don’t want to do that,” Nur warned. “It’s killed everyone who’s ever tried it.”

“Except one,” Erik said.

“Charles is _exceptional,_ ” Nur said. “Charles holds the key to advancing the powers of every psychic in Division, yes, but it will take months, maybe years, of dedicated scientific work to make that serum safe. Do you think you’re his equal, Erik Lehnsherr? Little Erik, who couldn’t save his mother, or his Watcher friend, or his imagined lover?”

“No,” Erik said. “But I have to try, don’t I?” And he depressed the plunger into his arm.

This next part he’d never heard described, so he had to imagine how it went.

He fell to his knees, his hands shaking. He groaned, a hand cupped around the injection site. He convulsed. He was on the ground, panting for breath, shaking, and he closed his eyes and went limp.

Someone bent over him and took the syringe from his limp hand. “What a waste,” Charles said, sounding unaccountably sad.

“Leave him,” Nur said. “The sample has been destroyed. We have the papers. It’s time to go.” The sound of the case being zipped up. Then footsteps as they left.

Erik lay there, feeling his breath. Shallow. In and out. The breeze on his skin. The stretch of his ribcage. The cold floor beneath him.

Eventually, the reverberation of footsteps on the concrete.

He opened his eyes. Irene was looking down at him. She was smiling. “We did it, loser,” she said.

Erik sat up and stretched. His limbs ached from the fake convulsions. He smiled at her, a little less enthusiastically, but still genuine. “Where’s the real case?” he asked.

“I hid it in the alley outside,” Irene said. She offered him a hand; he grasped it and let her help haul him upright. “Warning, I think the rats might have chewed through the plastic.”

“That’s okay,” Erik said. “We have what we need.” He made a face as he flexed his left arm, still sore where he’d injected himself. “What was that?”

“You got Charles to Shift the decoy out of contact lens solution,” Irene said sheepishly.

“Lovely,” Erik deadpanned.

Outside, Irene rolled back another tarp that had been used to cover up a dumpster, and pulled an identical plain black case as the one Nur and Charles had taken out. They opened it; not because they had any doubt what was inside it, but because after what they’d gone through to get it, it only seemed right that they take a moment to savor their victory. Inside, a sheaf of papers—most of them useless, like Charles had explained, but some that were a timetable and set of locations, labeled SUBJECT MYST—TRANSPORTATION SCHEDULE. Erik checked his watch. It was a thirteen-hour flight from Hong Kong to LA, and then probably another couple of hours to South Dakota. They had two days before they needed to intercept that train.

“So we free Raven,” Irene said, her voice almost quavering with excitement. “And we use the serum sample as leverage to keep Division off our backs.”

“Yeah,” Erik said. “To start with.”

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

CODA: LEAVES ON THE LINE

It wasn’t the first time that the train had slowed to a halt, but it was rare enough that Raven opened her eyes and sat up curiously on the plain white cot in the boxcar she called her home. She waited for one of her minders to come in and tell her that it was nothing, just leaves on the line again or something else asinine. She’d given up on her hopes of being rescued long ago, but this was the most exciting thing that happened to her—brief interruptions to her schedule. She counted the seconds of this delay, excitement mounting in her as it lasted longer and longer. At last, a voice crackled through the loudspeaker. 

“Sorry, Raven, there’s a tree on the tracks.”

A tree on the tracks! She tried to calculate where she was based on the storms that would’ve been necessary to knock a tree over on the tracks. It was still a depressingly big expanse of space—most of America’s heartland was tornado and thunderstorm country. She decided she was in Kansas. She’d read _The Wizard of Oz_ once, a long time ago, before Division had found her and locked her up, and she’d always wanted a dog like Toto.

She lay back down, wondering how long it would take for the tree to be cleared away—maybe they’d be stalled for _days_ , though she didn’t think it likely. Then sat bolt upright again when the lights flickered, and went out.

This had never happened before.

“Hello?” she called out, fully aware that no one could hear her; her minders only ever spoke to her through the loudspeaker. She suspected the boxcar was soundproofed. Still, it made her feel better to say something. It made her feel less alone in the dark.

In a moment, emergency lights came on, bathing her cell in red. She stood up warily. She was only wearing a paper hospital gown, but she was stronger and faster than most people, especially in her natural form. She let her scales flicker out and turn her blue, her fist clenched. She didn’t know what she was expecting—if it was one of her minders, they’d just gas the place—but maybe they were being robbed? Maybe it was someone she’d have to fight.

Or maybe she was being rescued—

She shut the idea down mercilessly. Except then, with a crushing groan, the heavy steel door between her boxcar and the next one on the train—snapped off.

Light flooded her eyes. She cried out; she hadn’t seen sunlight in years. Standing there were two people, a tall, slim Mover who waved his hand and set down the door on the grass outside, and a teenage girl in sunglasses about her age. The girl smiled. She was _beautiful_ , with pale, ash-blond hair and a prim upturned nose and a knowing smile, like she knew everything about Raven and always had. She held out her hand, and Raven lowered her fists without thinking about it.

“Let’s move it along, Irene,” the Mover grunted. “I can’t hold them back much longer.”

“Just a second,” Irene said, and she smiled at Raven, and Raven felt a purple blush come to her blue cheeks. “Hello, Raven. You and I are going to be _very_ good friends.”

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

CODA: HKG TO IAD

On the private jet back to Division headquarters in Maryland, Charles sat down across from the case and flicked it open. Esmail was in the cockpit speaking to the pilot. Charles fingered the empty depression where the syringe should’ve sat, thinking of Erik—stupid, fiery, deluded, fierce, talented, _wasted_ Erik—and sighed. Then he took out the papers and flicked through them.

He knew that Esmail’s priority had been getting him back—his partner, his _friend_ —and he was grateful, but Charles’s training as an agent told him that the papers and serum were more important. If someone other than Erik and a teenage girl had learned that the US was on the verge of a major breakthrough in psychic warfare… had learned of Raven… even Erik and Irene might have managed to blackmail Division by threatening to send the serum to the Chinese or Russian governments. What had he been _thinking_ , stealing those papers? Threatening everything he’d worked for as a Division agent for years? He went over the most damning of them one last time, flipping through Raven’s transport schedule—

—Wait.

Something wasn’t right. Something about the psychic texture of the papers—

Charles looked closely, with all his senses, and swore. These weren’t the original papers—they were something else, Shifted to look like the originals. He vaguely remembered, through a haze of fever and exhaustion, Erik asking him to Shift a decoy suitcase—which meant that the injection Erik had taken had been a decoy—which meant—

Which meant that they had the case.

In a fury, Charles unShifted the papers, and found himself holding a red envelope. He had to get up. He had to alert Esmail to their failure, had to start working down a plan to track Irene and Erik _down._ It was impossible to move Raven, but they could station extra guards around her train—he was planning, plotting, even as, as if by muscle memory, he unsealed the envelope, which was addressed _To Charles._

He pulled out a photograph.

He didn’t remember taking it. Or—he did, but through the haze of memories he’d implanted in Erik’s mind. The two of them, standing in front of the Cyclone, Erik holding an ice cream cone, grinning at the camera. And Charles not looking at the camera, but looking at Erik. Adoringly. As though he were his whole world. The photograph, what he held in his hands now, was real.

Charles wiped at his face and was surprised when his hand came away wet. The photograph was real. They’d gone to Coney Island and taken this picture.

It had all been real, all along.

He turned the photograph over. In Erik’s scrawl—which was so familiar, how could he have ever thought that anything about Erik was unfamiliar, was just a product of their minds melting together and not the realest thing Charles had ever known—were four words: KILL HIM. LOVE YOU.

“Charles?” Esmail said. He’d come back from the cockpit. He settled in the seat across from him. “What do you have there?”

Charles looked up and met his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is sung to the tune of "coney island" by Taylor Swift ft. The National.
> 
> Thanks to [lavenderlotion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavenderlotion/pseuds/lavenderlotion) for cheering me on and giving this a whirlwind beta and [flightinflame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightinflame/pseuds/flightinflame) for running a terrific bang. Thank you also to the inimitable [Librata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/librata) for making this _sick_ [moodboard](https://librata-laments.tumblr.com/post/629191834728644608/) for the fic and my artist [destinyrainevans](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destiny_Rain_Evans) for this lovely [art](https://destinyrainevans.tumblr.com/post/629201947002552320/)!
> 
> I do the tumble @ [tumblr](https://midrashic.tumblr.com/). Also, come chat us up on the [X-Men X-traordinaire (18+)](https://discord.gg/7HyhZ5R) Discord server!
> 
> My comment policy boils down to one thing: **Please comment.** You. Yes, you in particular. If you would like examples, a simple heart emoji or “+kudos” now that the multiple kudos function has been disabled are hugely appreciated. Your comment does not have to be profound. Your comment does not have to be long. If all you have the energy for is the heart emoji, i appreciate that much more than a kudos or a bookmark. A kudos is not interchangeable with a short comment that says “great job!” or something similar. I always respond to comments. Comments on old works are just as valuable, maybe even more so, than comments on new works. If you feel like your comments mean less than those from people I regularly interact with, you’re wrong; comments mean more from a stranger. I would prefer a “please update” to no comment. I would prefer a short comment to no comment. I would prefer criticism to no comment. Comments keep writers writing and in the fandoms you love. **Please comment.**


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